


The Tragedy Of Malcolm And Maria

by HarveyMcScorpius



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aquarium Worker, F/M, If this SHOULD BE TAKEN OUT of the TSOW archive tell me, Jazz Soundtrack, Oceanside Community, Original work - Freeform, Romance, Tragedy, fictional setting, fishman
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-25 01:13:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13823352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyMcScorpius/pseuds/HarveyMcScorpius
Summary: You know, the day destroys the night / I say, that's life / Somewhere, beyond the sea / Is you is, or is you ain't / I went for a walk on a winter's day / Somebody have mercy, and tell me what is wrong with me / gotta get on up and do my thing





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Original work, inspired by Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape Of Water, probably the greatest movie of all time. Don't get me started on it, or I'll never stop. As this is an original work, it will be updated FAR less frequently than my fanfictions. I want to get it published one day and want it perfect.

THE TRAGEDY OF MALCOLM AND MARIA

“ _ How shall I speak of Doom, and ours in special, But as something altogether common?” _

_ \--Donald Justice _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


CHP1 -  _ The Ocean ponders his Fortunes. _

 

He looks up at the men, in their yellow coats. He sees them bathed in moonlight as he stares up through the water. They carry nets, filled with succulent fish. He looks at them and he wonders what lives they live. He wonders what secret flavors their existences offer, what they taste above water that he cannot below it. The question had perplexed him for some time. He saw them often, distorted as if by magic through the inky sea. He watched as they tossed their nets into his home, or jump into the water themselves, or light up the sky with their fireworks as they revel and drink. He watches all of these things and he wonders.

Since they had first come into his waters he had watched them. He had been primitive then, hissing and roaring at them when their boats drew too near. Eventually, he became curious. What were these pink and smooth beings? Who were they to traverse the waters and not become wet? Hostility became fear became curiosity became acceptance. They were beyond him as he was beyond them. They were young, bull-headed. Such a foreign entity as him would bring them only questions. Questions, at least for humans brought them answers, hasty ones, and those always brought suffering. But he was alone, singular. They partied and fished and swam with their boats, with one another. What had he? He had no name, for names are what others call one by. He had no home, for he shared his wet abode with a thousand known and unknown things, though none of them were truly his kin. What great envious secret knew they, to call upon  _ others _ ?

As he waited below the waves and watched the fishermen, unloading their catches in the rainy darkness, he very much wanted to learn that secret. Being a lone thing, with nothing else like himself in all the world’s waters and sands, weighed heavily on him. He chittered under the glass surface of the water. Plenty of things under here were brown-scaled, like him, and many things too had spines, like those that finned his shoulders. They had his serpentine yellow eyes and his green stripes, his serrated fangs and the protective shell of his back. They had the tiny suckers on the insides of his powerful forearms, and they had the minuscule spikes on his paler forehead.

He shares so much with so many in the endless oceans. Why then does he feel so alone?

Early in life, when he had been brash, he had tried to change his Shape to fit these many things. To the world, it might not have been obvious, but he was malleable, like clay. His form would shift at his slightest will. Of his own skin, he was master, and he took great advantage of that gift in his youth. He would shift his arms to be more like a fish’s fins, his head to be more like a shark’s, his legs to be spindly and more numerous, like a crab. One of these things would take him, would they not? One of them  _ must _ know that secret that men knew, mustn’t they?

But always, his limbs were not meant to coil and remake in those ways. His flesh always burned when he tried, the Shapes he made always ugly. His form curled in all the wrong places. It forced him onto two feet instead of fins, burdened him with two arms instead of eight. Like a spring, his true self would always bounce back to the lonely and mismatched thing it was. After many of these attempts, he realized what ailed him so. 

He was unique. 

So horrifyingly rare was he that, there was nothing beneath the waves that saw him as kin. Crabs saw his suckers and ducked into their shells; Dolphins and seals saw his steaknife teeth and swam far from him. The irony of it had struck him through his hearts like an arrow, and he stopped changing his Shape in the years after.

He warbles, disheartened, and turns in the water, away from the humans, their fish and their dock. He swims to the bottom, whose blackness shames even the most terrible of land’s nights. Here he is safe from himself. The moon cannot find him here. At lesser depths it would catch the markings in his scales, lighting him up and making his whole shameful Shape a beacon of humiliation. 

Now, instead of pondering the secret that the men hoard, he ponders his own situation. He sits in the sand he cannot see, his shielded back presses against rocks the dark hides from him. The only light comes from the small things. Microorganisms float about in the water around him, their own bioluminescence making torches in the unperceivable liquid.

What a thing he is, trapped between a world that hates his Shape, and one that would fear his Shape.

_ His  _ Shape. He looks down at the formless black shroud that covers him, imagines his muscles and his brown scales. Then he looks up, to the light of a moon he cannot see, to those humans he envies so desperately. There is a similarity, he realizes. True, his Shape is curved and gives him a pair of arms and a pair of legs that all the ocean’s creatures despise. But, the humans up there on their dock had Shapes just like his! They too walked on two legs. They too unloaded their fish with two arms.

He smiles with serrated fangs, joyous fury in his hearts, and ponders.

 

Malcolm tread heavily through the aquarium doors, just as the last of the patrons, weary from a long day of marveling at the ocean’s wonders, filed out. Janitor duty called. The cart of wipes and paper towels and detergents waited for him, like a faithful old hound, in the supply rooms that he alone had the key to. Past yellow-green counters and computer-generated embellishment screens he plodded, past the first few man-sized tanks holding rockfish or sardines. Maudie, the aged old gift shop owner, had just handed a pair of blown-glass earrings to an older man. Malcolm waved at her, smiling. Maudie returned the wave curtly and hurriedly waved off the man, no doubt eager to be home.

Malcolm was silent; not for disappointment at Maudie, but for his decided muteness. His voice, his true voice, was garbled. It had been for many years, always that of a mutant and unable to conjure the sonic spells of communication. His home before Sarasota hadn’t had the facilities for sign language, so once he had moved to the small town on the California coast, he’d wasted no time in paying for lessons. Malcolm had regretted that. The poor instructor had tried so hard, and as he thought about it and mopped the worn floors, Malcolm’s heart went out to her. Always her commands fell short. His ears received them like waiting centurions, but his hands were rebellious. They were clumsy, used to mopping, not spindly and limber enough for the complex motions she’d tried to teach him. One week was all it had taken for the woman to scream in his face, throwing her copy of  _ Everything Sign Language _ across his living room and storming out of his apartment. 

Fortunately, Malcolm remembered with a smile, that same stiffness of the fingers that had made sign language an unknowable secret to him had given him handwriting so clear it almost looked typed. So he’d taken up the pen and the paper; simple and clear, no room for misinterpretation unless one couldn’t read.

The marine wind of the sea blew cold and full of particles against his back as Maudie left. Malcolm huffed, weary but not offended at the old lady’s surliness. That was the customary reaction he garnered from most people. Most of the employees at the little aquarium in Sarasota saw him as they might see a ghost; in fleeting glimpses, disturbing glimpses, or not at all. Malcolm wondered about these reactions as he unlocked the supply room door. Perhaps it was his short hair, silver in spite of his youthful appearance. Or, he thought, maybe it was his deep black eyes or the gently curved scar on the right side of his face that unnerved his colleagues. When they failed to notice him, Malcolm guessed it was for the same reason he carried a pen and paper under his arm. A guy with eyes like coal and  _ no voice _ wasn’t exactly the most friendly image.

For all of the struggle, Sarasota was as lovely a place as Malcolm had ever been. It was nothing like his hometown. The air was so empty in Sarasota, free space for salt and water and the music of the waves, not at all like where he’d come from. And the people,  _ the people! _ True, they weren’t saints, but at least they gave Malcolm the time of day. True, they ignored him or were perturbed by him. But there was something about them, the secret passions and horrors that being so invisible allowed him to overhear; the soft bits of their personas, like pearls within clams, captivate him. 

He had just melted into the vacuum of time, forgetting the seconds and all sense of direction other than the  _ back _ and the  _ forth _ of the mop, when someone or something bumped into him. He fell to the tiled floor of the building. The mop clattered next to him and he quickly recovered, back on his knees in a second.

Before him stood two women, clad in the black undershirts and deep blue vests that were standard work attire. To the right was the one who had accidentally knocked him down. Her hair was red and brown, cascading to her shoulder blades in auburn curls. She had small, squinty eyes and a large nose. However, it was flat and curved at the bottom, like the beak of a hawk. Her jaw was the perfect likeness of an oval and she had a long, pretty neck. Her figure was heavier set but not outlandish.

Malcolm observes all of this and more as he stares at her. More than a little dumbfounded, he does not think to stand up. Half of his immobility is her beauty and half of it is a nagging hole where her identity was. His mind fumbles and trips as his body had moments ago. He’d seen her around work before many times, but it had always been momentary, like remembering a face one sees in a crowded elevator on vacation. Malcolm guessed that was why his subconscious gripped empty air instead of the girl’s name.

The girl, for her part, seemed a little unnerved at the prostrate, mute and prematurely grey-haired young man before her. Her friend urges her to leave, muttering something about the “hobos that the managers just pick up off the street”, and pulls at her arm.

They’re halfway out the door, the dying evening light wringing shadows along the tiled floor, when Malcolm comes to. The mop clatters to the ground and in an instant the paper is in front of him, sliding out from under his arm like a blade from a scabbard. He scribbles upon it like a loon. Ink from the tip of the pen has barely seeped into the yellow-tinged paper before he turns on his heels. Malcolm skids out the door, ignoring the castigating look on the face of the girl’s friend as she looked back at him.

He sprinted over to the woman, his lungs feeling constricted, but not like his stomach. He felt ashamed for his insolence. How embarrassed she must have been, with him kneeling at her feet, eyes unfocused yet transfixed. The sensation pooled in his belly like a stone as he’d written. Malcolm felt more disappointment from his own heart than he possibly could from anyone else’s. Visions of solutions, of actions that would have been far more proper than freezing like a statue, rotated in his head. She looked at him like his former neighbors had, back at home. It cramped Malcolm’s heart when he saw that look, upon anyone’s face.

Well, no time for regrets. On to compensation.

He tapped the woman on the shoulder, hoping his eyes reflected the sincerity of his embarrassment. The tap was light, undemanding. She turns and looks at him.

“Look, if you’re going to do the whole altar of the Virgin Mary thing again -”

Malcolm holds the paper out to her and his eyes bounce like pinballs between it and her.

Her friend tugs on her sleeve, eyes rolled, but she waves the other woman off and reads the words like a librarian. Yellow pages are only a few inches from her face as she scans them slowly.

_ Hello, my name is Malcolm. I am sorry for seeming odd back in the building. I feel like I have seen you somewhere and I was trying to remember your name. Must have been very deep in thought, which is why I stayed on the ground. I did not mean to make anyone uncomfortable. Please accept my apology. _ __

She wrinkled her nose, clearly nonplussed. “Wha-- alright. Well, why not just say that, man?”

Malcolm takes the pad from her, scrawling on it for a moment. The two of them stand there. Invisible sickles of wind bite through both of their clothes as the sun dips behind the edge of the bay, several miles or two to their left. All of the pier the aquarium was built upon was swallowed in blueish shadows. The woman waits, albeit a little tetchy. Her nose remains crinkled as her tiny eyes almost disappear, and she looks Malcolm up and down, observing him like a fish in one of the tanks of the aquarium they both work at. After a little less than a minute, he finishes. The pad returns to her and again she reads.

_ I do not speak. I am mute, and sign language is not a thing I can easily use. It only took me so long to get to you because I had to write back in the building. _

Malcolm chews his lip, right where the scar blunts it into eternal scabbing. He took a fair bit of time, less time writing and more time thinking of a lie. She already looked at him like a lusty leper. Telling her the particular circumstances keeping Malcolm silent wasn’t bound to help his stance with her.

“That explains it,” she said. “Well, uhm . . .” her hand arcs uncertain near her face, as if grasping in the stinging cold wind for words. “Y-you’re forgiven! I’ll see you . . .” She turns to leave, and Malcolm  _ almost _ allows the fates to give her a step before he taps her again. Her other shoulder feels it this time.

“Yes?” She queries. Exasperation leans into her voice like an obnoxious partygoer.

Malcolm writes quickly.

_ I do not suppose that I could be given your name, after all the social hoop-jumping I just went through. _

For what it’s worth, he smiles bashfully when she looks back up at him, and a cautious, small smirk crawls up her face too.

“Maria,” she says. "Maria Bonzer.” Maria turns on her heels and walks to her car. Not long after, where the pier connected with the coastline and Sarasota proper, the night that burns with headlights and stoplights and freezing air consumes the outline of her black Carolla.

Malcolm looks down onto his paper, scribbled with the words he’d exchanged with her.

At the top, above every letter and margin, he writes.

_ Maria Bonzer. _

Malcolm thinks he hears Sam Cooke, asking for mercy, in his ears.

 


	2. Chapter 2

CHP2 -  _ The Ocean becomes Amorphous. _

 

It had been tedious at first. Unused for endless years, his ability to change his Shape had to be carefully relearned, remastered. Like a lover he had scorned, it required patience, time, and gentleness. He started it slowly. The knowledge of that secret art stretched in his heart, like an atrophied limb given new life. Visions of his doubts and his fears flashed in his head as he experimented. He saw crabs scuttle away from him, jellyfish drift in the opposite direction for fear he would snap their gelatinous bodies into his mouth. Their fear of him, their revulsion, is clear as broken glass in these foreseeings. Each of these wounds him more than the largest of sharks, but like that master predator, it also gives him drive. Every time he sees them, the impulse within him to  _ change _ grows stronger. He must  _ escape _ . The sensation of scales sinking into nothing, of serrated teeth becoming rectangular and clefted, and his shell melting as his Shape changes, fills his being with instinct. It is a heady and commanding drug in his brain. He has to get away. In higher places, where the fishermen dwelt, in the places they lived . . . there he would find the secret; the remedy to his solitude. Besides, what did he leave behind in the ocean? He had nothing but hostile neighbors and whatever crevasse he could fit his spined body into. It was not as though parting with these repellant things hurt him or gave him any pause.

He lays in a clearing in the coral, one that no unneighborly octopus or eel has taken. As his form shifts and bones and muscles rearrange into patterns untested, his thoughts wander. The motion and the burning sensation murk his mind. Time falls into this black elixir and is lost. He can identify not the seconds or minutes, for all of his attention hooks on his physical renovation and his  _ plan _ . 

It was daring, original. The idea had sparked like lightning in his head. He smiled, both for the euphoria that bit at his heart like a barracuda and for the humor of the whole event. How had it taken him so long to conceive such a plan?! He had watched humans for so long. So many living, undulating things had been birthed and returned to the sand as he’d gazed up at them. He had borne witness to their ships grow larger, their surfaces harden and smooth over, felt their presences and auras multiplied over so many infinite lifetimes. Preposterous it was, then, that the idea had never manifested in his youthful cerebrum. He looked as they did, and surely some primeval intelligence dwelled in them as it did in him. After all, he had never witnessed any creature in any ocean build what humans had. Nor had he seen them communicate in such unrelated flows and hums. Truly to be so specific and localized in dialect, and such masters of nest-building, humans must be as perspicacious as he was.

And perhaps one day, after his  _ escape _ , after his ugliness and his browns and greens were scorched from his soul, he would share  _ more  _ with them than just stirrings of the mind.

For now, he works his hidden talents, specialties older than time.

 

Some days, Malcolm felt as though his muteness was a stopper in his throat, and all the demons and oblivion that occasionally roused inside him were contained there; he could not speak of his troubles for the plug that kept him silent. Without that escape, what else could he do? Malcolm’s options were to bury his troubles within him or let them out, along with the closely-guarded secret to his silence. Bottled up inside him, the isolation and the logicless terror propagate like cancers. Every so often they grow back, stronger. Malcolm wasn’t without remedy, however.  Since he had come to Sarasota, his days were spent in the arms of two lovers. They were sympathetic to him, catching his unsure and desperate body in gentle arms. 

He called these sirens worry and music. 

Worry was less a partner and more of a drug. Worry medicated him, made all of the biting, gnawing fear that his mind conjured from nothing bearable. Malcolm hated worry. He knew that the hold it had on him was unnatural and unhealthy. But, with a sway of a curved hip, worry sashayed its way into his lap again. Like an old flame he knew it’d be trouble to give a second chance, he sinks into worry when it strikes; makes love to it.

Now,  _ music  _ . . .

Music was the priestess. Music was the guardian. Music sidled up to Malcolm, rubbed his shoulders, eased the crushing doubt from his bones. Music decided the color of his soul, each and every day; greens and blues, yellows and reds and golds and blacks. All of them are painted in by music. The erratics of Malcolm’s emotions could switch on a dime. All that decided such things was the frequency of the beat, whether there were trombones or saxophones playing, whether they roared or sang soprano. 

Now it’s a tossup, guesswork. None but God know where Malcolm’s spirit will fall. The ancient nature within him, so concealed for so long, is flaunted to the world. He sways in his apartment, a twirl of rope lights up on the wall bursting and lurid through his eyelids. They’re closed; Malcolm absorbs himself in it. The night and the booming ocean lure him out through the window he faces, engulfing him. He drowns in the sea of _Harlem Nocturne_ , the cover done by the Viscounts _._ This one was undeniably Malcolm’s favorite. He’d tasted others, the original written in 1939, and a few others covers created in the 90’s. The one he soaks into himself now is easily the most ethereal. It’s solemn, burning, black. The song ripples through the air from a brownish radio, an older model. Malcolm delighted in radios; he never knew what melody would greet him next and to what vast vistas it would take him. It taught him to value when the song that came on brought an uncontrollable smile to his lips; so full of meaningless rhymes and soulless tunes, the radio instilled in Malcolm the ability to appreciate what he got. 

It reminded him of one of his few friends. 

Marty was a homeless man who lived with a few others under the ramp of a freeway, the last breeze-blasted curve before one was on the interstate roads, out of Sarasota and into the starry hills. He told Malcolm that he’d been in the military years ago, battling overseas in Iraq when he’d not been old enough to fight before Vietnam ended. When Malcolm heard music on the radio, _true_ _music_ that set his spirit ablaze, he supposes he felt the same way Marty did when someone came by with food or, more importantly, a bowl of homemade potato chips. Coincidentally, Malcolm had become very good at dicing potatoes.

“I tell you, man,” Marty had said once, the wind from the beach buffeting the Viking-like beard on his face. “I remember every Sunday comin’ back from church and waiting all day to catch  _ The Jetsons  _ with my lil’ sister. And what do you think we had sittin’ between us?” He’d grabbed a chip from the bowl Malcolm had brought him; it was the largest, glittered the brightest with particles of salt. “A bowl of these beautiful things. A few years later, watching Apollo 11 launch out of Florida. . .” Marty had bitten down on the largest sliver of potato, savoring the taste. “Almost forgot to grab some, we were so blown away.”

Through the window, a wall of salt wind, whipped and licked into fury out on the sea, hits him right in the face. The smell, an aroma of salt and life and the coldest bluest fathoms, fills Malcolm’s nostrils, rocking his whole being with the presence and might of something unidentifiable. His nature is overpowering now, pure, primal and ageless. He keeps moving, undulating, swishing back and forth.  _ Harlem Nocturne  _ fades into the darkness outside.

  
  
  
  


Ah. Maria sighs, the breath tickling her arm. Another Friday, another week, down.

She pulls the rich blue cloth of her work uniform up to her nose. Something chemical wafted from the threads, like she was holding the chlorine filter of a swimming pool up to her nose. A small gag slithers in her throat. It smelt  _ terrible _ . If someone had emptied the seas and let all the flopping life in them die and bake in the sun for weeks, whatever detergent had caked its stench into her clothes would still smell worse. For some reason, an image of lemons popped into Maria’s head when she made the mistake of breathing in a second time, vest still in hand. The wind is drowsy as she exits the aquarium, heading into the pier’s parking lots. She’s glad. She’d worried this morning, wolfing down a waffle and a glass of milk. Would she need a sweatshirt today? Whatever God decided Sarasota’s weather was a fickle prick indeed. Through rain and sun and hail and even snow (once or twice, many many years ago) mother nature cycles, wondering how to infuriate the people who lived upon her. Was the weather forecast even correct? They frequently were not. Maria finds herself expecting the worst more than she should.

A gust of air, risen from the seeming dead, catches her. It blows and billows her vest, and the sterilized miasma strikes again. Like a tribal drum, a low pain starts to seize and release in Maria’s head. She mutters a swear and cranes her long neck, keeping the scent from contaminating her hair. The blue vest comes off, wrapped into a disdainful ball in her hand. Very quickly the headache expanded, growing in pain in accordance with the cold of the wind. Both rip through Maria, and the cleaning agent’s odor rolls like fog around her. She wishes very urgently to find her Corolla and go home. Whose day had she pissed all over to deserve this?

First it had been Maudie that morning when she’d arrived, rasping at her every time she passed by the gift shops the old woman worked. Maudie moaned that the exhibition Maria had helped design, rust and black-colored rooms filled with octopi and squid labeled  _ Snared!: A Selection of Cephalopods,  _ was. . .

“Too loud!” The ancient hag had said. “One of them just won’t stop banging on the back of his tank. All day, Maria!” She smacked a wrinkled and veiny hand onto the tiled register counter thrice, annoyed eyes following Maria the whole way across the lobby. “I’m on the other side of the wall! You couldn’t have asked administration to do this upstairs?” Maria had just sighed and closed her eyes. She and Maudie had both worked there for years, and she was familiar with the other woman’s tendency to take any slight against her like the betrayal of Christ. “Tch,” was all she’d said in reply. Maudie’s croaking rage, like a furious frog, followed Maria deep into the building, until she closed the door to the Curator’s office.

After that she’d had her co-worker, Jasmine, berate her at  _ least _ once every hour about the janitor, the one with the strange eyes, the grey hair. Malcolm! Maria remembers that Jasmine hadn’t seen the paper the silent man had given her. All she knew was his post in the aquarium, mopping the floors and wiping the glass of the tanks, big and small. All  _ Maria _ knew was that Jasmine’s sense of humor had not evolved once since they were thirteen. “Check him out!” She’d said as Malcolm had gone by the office later that day. “Eyes that make ya freeze, face all scarred up and hair like an oldie. Like Ilyn Payne or somethin’. A bachelor for the ages.” 

“Who?”

“You mean you haven’t watched  _ Game of Thrones _ ?”

At that, faced with the prospect of Jasmine detailing the whole of the show’s plot with perfectly placed spoilers, Maria had checked out. For the next hour or so she’d divided her attention between writing a brainstorming list of cephalopods in popular culture for  _ Snared! _ and watching Malcolm out the window of the office. He teetered on a high, white ladder, vigilant in making the glass portal of the massive tank sparkle. The thing was gargantuan, filling the wall opposite her office. Behind the twenty-inch-thick glass, untold swaths of water held the largest exhibit in the building. On the floor, mock coral and sand met the silken flesh of eels and rays. Mobs of neurotic sardines blanketed parts of the tank in flashing, sliver shrouds; tuna huddled together, wary and tribal, in isolated corners; the grey arrows of barracudas whizz through the water in the same fashion as bullets might; and the sharks, three blues and a proud tiger, marauded around the tank like ridged kings.

All of these things Malcolm had worked diligently to reveal. Maria had watched. There had been something in the way he moved; something alien, otherworldly. The longer he’d scrubbed and sprayed and slid the rags across the glass, the longer Maria had observed, and, the longer Maria had observed, the more mesmerizing his movements became. She finds her mind drifting to him; marching out of her memory and into the Maria in the present, with a headache and a foul-smelling uniform. It’s a mystery to her as to why he occupies the space in her head that he does. The two of them haven’t shared many moments together since their coincidental meeting, and Maria’s made sure to keep her distance. She greets Malcolm with only curtness and short replies. Why does an imprint of him stick in her head like it does now? 

Maria takes in another breath and immediately wishes she hadn’t. Brows furrowing distressingly, she almost doesn’t hear her low moan of pain over the rushing wind. Only now becoming apparent to her is the vacuum where the weight of her keys should be. Swears that might have bloodied the ears of well-to-do folk leave Maria’s mouth. She’s half a mind to lay on the lot’s asphalt and just cry. All the same, through the frustrating despair, she sees him again. Malcolm reappears in her mind almost without her realizing. He’s a fixture there, like a lightning rod, and more of her focus upon him breeds more and more separation from her pain. So for the moment, her car continually elusive, Maria sits on one of the concrete islands and thinks.

She asks herself what this odd acquaintance is to her, and the answer is clear as the sky was blue. Malcolm was just that, an acquaintance. What then, is his intrigue?  Was it that peculiar fashion with which he moved through the world? Was it his silence, and the curiosity as to the secrets of his life it invited? There is some kind of  _ way _ the man has about him, some secret radiation he gives off that transfixes her.

Maria is no longer left to wonder. She’s just finished observing the pink and orange waves in the evening sky as a car rolls up to the island. The Ford Thunderbird is clearly very old, tarnished, with paint having rubbed off in spots and exposing different colors underneath. Even with its wear, the hood sparkles like a sliver, splotchy platter, and the rest of the car glints under the parking lot lighting that had just turned on. 

Languidly, the dark glass of the window rolls down, down, down, and from the saxophone-filled interior of the car a yellow pad of paper emerges. Instinctively Maria reaches up and grabs it, her eyes maneuvering slowly over the clear, stony letters.

_ Car says it is under 55 out. Heat is on. Louis Jordan disc in the player; ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t?’. Hop in? _

Maria stood, and before she had even realized it she was halfheartedly watching the pier fade into the distance behind her from Malcolm’s rearview mirror, in the passenger seat of his car. She only caught Malcolm’s glance once or twice for his focus on the road, and though his eyes were steely, she could see a flame in them. It was like watching someone dance, letting primal things guide their hands and feet as their hearts and the music entwine. The same bond is in Malcolm’s eyes, cycling like wind to the tune of Louis Jordan _.  _ Maria debates asking him something, where he’s taking her, if he saw her keys on his way out, then realizes with hands on the wheel he couldn’t respond to her. She knows being unaware of their destination should worry her. The man isn’t yet one whose being she knows well enough to be called a friend. He could be taking her out to an alley to gut her for all she knew. Worse happened to people on better terms somewhere in the world every day.

The light in front of them turns yellow, then flashes crimson. Malcolm’s nostrils flare and the corners of his mouth turn down in annoyance. For a moment, it’s just the two of them, accompanied by the rumble of passing cars and the music. The stream of vehicles blocking their path is thick and endless. Malcolm breathes deep and retrieves his paper and pencil.

_ Long light. Maybe we can talk? _

“I don’t see why not,” Maria says, upon receiving the firmness of the pad. “How’d you know I was still at work?” One auburn eyebrow raises on her face, and her companion shrugs.

_ Your friend caught me at my car. Apparently, some guy just recently broke your heart and you needed some comfort. Not sure why she asked me to. The two of you clearly have a better relationship than you and I. _ __

An infuriating image materializes in Maria’s head as she read. Jasmine, driving home, jeering at how clever she thought herself, playing matchmaker with her angry and afflicted friend. As if today hadn’t been enough. Maria’s hands clench hard on her thighs and a low growl bubbles in the back of her throat. It becomes a groan as her head begins to throb again; she tosses the source of the evil, the blue vest, into the backseat and sighs. Malcolm snatches the board back, his eyes pools of remorse.

_ Forgive me, I should have just left that bit out. Sorry he did not turn out to be who you- _

Maria stopped reading there. Where once a wolf’s snarl had been, laughter echoed up through her body. She chuckles deeply. Malcolm’s look of confusion only sinks her mirth to new fathoms. “Don’t be. None of this is your fault, man. It’s my cunt friend who should be sorry. She bugged me all day about you; I guess  _ she’s _ trying to get  _ us _ to get together, instead of being useful and having any idea where my goddamn keys are.”

Now Malcolm smiles. No doubt his muteness robbed him of true laughter, the kind Maria knew. But once again, his eyes are alight with what his mouth cannot communicate. The lines near his lashes crinkled as his lips drew up, and the black of his eyes softens, seeming so much warmer than it had; like the fertile, humid soil of some ancient rainforest garden. His teeth, revealing themselves for the first time to her, were creamy white, the shade of pearls. Malcolm gives  _ body language  _ a new meaning entirely. 

_ This is Jasmine, yes? I saw her tag. She seems to be a flagrant prima donna. _

“Nah, I swear she’s got a good heart, but . . . Goddamn! If she’d just learn to keep to herself. Like she walked out of  _ Real Housewives _ .”

Another  _ thunk! _ of pain inside her skull reminds Maria to not be so frugal with her openness. Malcolm challenges it.

_ Are you alright? _

“Just a headache,” she answers. “Got some cleaning agent in my clothes and I’ve been breathing it in all day.” A small grin manifests on Maria’s face. “Wouldn’t be your work, would it?” She drawls. 

Malcolm holds his hands up in mock surrender, fingertips mottled from exposure to the thousand-and-one chemicals he cleaned with, the ones that leeched vitality from whatever they touched.  _ Not me.  _ Again, though, he defies the throbbing in her head and the familiar chewing at her heart.

_ You said you had something in your clothes? _

“Yeah.”

_ May I drive you home so you can wash them? _

“No point,” Maria huffs. “Some dickweed threw a brick in it. Apartment complex, by the way. The manager doesn’t seem to care enough to get it fixed or replace it. Me and a neighbor went and cleaned up the scraps. Looked like  _ Dark Of The Moon _ in there.”

Malcolm’s hand is almost to his pad when the final car crosses the intersection in front of them and the light flashes emerald. The engine revs up again, and Maria is speeding through the night, the only lights flashing from the front of the car and from Malcolm’s eyes. With no gray-haired mute to keep her company, Maria drowns in an ocean of notions and conceptions. The ease with which Malcolm had coaxed the gates into her good graces open, and her spirits up to the heavens, surfaces from that multicolored sea first. Maria is only able to ponder that strange, sloping creature that emerges for a few seconds. The next light turns yellow. Maria swears she hears a low, unintelligible growl from somewhere in the car, barely audible enough to qualify as a trick of acoustics. Malcolm’s eyes fly to the lanes at their left, where few cars sit. He writes with the flurrying swiftness of Hermes until honks from behind him cause him to dump the notepad in her lap and slam on the gas.

_ I am not far from this street. We can wash your things there and I can drive you home after. Also sorry if I do no- _ and the rest was illegible, naught but an angry scar of grey where letters would have been.

_ Why not? _ Maria writes back.

 

Malcolm had been gruff when the day had begun. The morning sun glinted off the waves, greeting him in the day’s early hours, and he was gruff. That same orb of fire lorded over the earth at high noon, and he was still gruff. Stoicness came to him as easily as breathing did, though he can’t remember having been that way before he’d moved to Sarasota. Now, the sun was gone, and a different celestial body occupied his attention. This one was different from the two that hung in the sky. She didn’t glow with light, but some kind of raging willfulness that dripped from her every word. She walked on legs instead of being gripped by gravity and cast through the cosmos. And now that she was in his car, walking with him through  _ his _ apartment complex, his bottom lip trembles and his belly  _ positively smolders. _ Malcolm shakes from the sheer  _ possibility _ . Images of her flash in his mind; where on Earth could he,  _ they _ , go from here? Maria had the most beautiful hands. He’d like to hold them; like her to hold his. Would she want him, like he wanted her? Did he want  _ her _ , or want her body? The questions don’t stop as they trod through the front gates, Maria’s face only giving away the slightest hint of satisfaction as they converse, mouth and paper in dialogue.

One pause as they pass under the terraced roof of the open laundry room, and then Malcolm writes-

_ Just pick whichever one, Maria. I am pretty sure they all work. _

Maria tosses the foul clothes in, and the whirring of the washer soon roars into being.

“They better,” she replies as she leans on one of the entryway’s posts, the amber glow of the naked lightbulb in the ceiling molding around her auburn locks of hair. Malcolm thinks the two colors are a happy couple. “Or else you’ll have to stay home from work tomorrow.”

_ Why is that? _

“Why, I’ll have taken your clothes. Aren’t we great friends now, or some such? I doubt you’ll want to be naked in front of a co-worker. Definitely not  _ Maudie _ .”

The embers in Malcolm’s stomach glow, heating as she smirked wickedly, visibly relishing the horrified look that must have dawned on his face at the thought of the old woman seeing him nude. He could feel a prickling in his cheeks, and then they warmed just as his belly had. Malcolm shakes his head vehemently, lets of a ghost of a smile light up his face, and cheeks still red scrawls in roughy, scratchy letters  _ NO! _

“Alright, alright,” Maria replied.  There’s a silence between them for a moment, an aura of goodness and comfort as Malcolm beams to himself and Maria smiles wryly. The washer rolls on, and they think.

_ You want to wash the shirt, too? _ Malcolm gestures to the white cotton currently covering Maria’s torso. She crossed her arms under her breasts and lifted an arching noir stairway of an eyebrow at him. 

“What, so now you want me naked? God _damn_ _hypocrite_!” She cast her finger at him like John Winthrop damning a wand-wielding witch. The last three syllables were stressed to humorous lengths, and she snickered lightly, sighing.

Malcolm’s black eyes became pits of Hell as he glared at her, writing in long, pressured gashes. Even so, the flames in his core rose, yearning to meet this stimulus. The possibility of this night near Maria that had dumbfounded him before was corrupted. She’d made mention of herself being naked, and in a blink there she was, nude as the day she’d been born, in his mind (though her proportions were perhaps out of sync with reality). Now they were black flames, dark fire inside him, and he wanted more, more, more, the interest in Maria’s mysteries and her life shouted out by that unyielding sexual pull for  _ more _ . Malcolm had been here before. If he didn’t stop feeding them now, those flames would burn him away too, and Malcolm would be slightly more motivated to make what he saw in his mind a reality.

_ I was only being polite! _

“And I was only joking. You’re awful uptight; y’know, there’s a dispensary only a few blocks down from my house . . .” He relaxes a little bit.

_ Weed was never my thing. _

“Well then what is?”

_ Music.  _

Another pointed stare. “That it?”

_ I do not get out much. Plenty interests me. Rent is high, and money is tight, so not much is available to me. Sarasota is tiny! _

“Amen to that!” Maria flashes a hand sign to the sky, her face twisting in not quite a smile, but an attractive mask nonetheless.

_You see!_ _You understand._

“Been here all my life. Of course I do.”

_ Never been anywhere else? _

“Oh no, nothing like that. I have friends all over; a couple in San Francisco, one or two in Fresno . . . Visited Canada way back when, but I was so young I’d hardly remember it.” Her eyes flash wide as if she’d just awoken from a slumber where she rested upon a hundred of her own, secret thoughts. “How about you?”

The question motivates Malcolm’s teeth to dig into his lower lip, seemingly of their own accord. He hopes his companion doesn’t notice, and whether or not Maria is aware of the hyperfast motion, she doesn’t say anything about it.

_ Nowhere you would want to know about. _

She cocks her head, facial muscles flexing into a smile. “Well,” she replies. “Must’ve been somewhere. Truth be told, I wonder a lot about what the world’s like outside -well- California, but mostly Sarasota. Guessing you aren’t a native yourself?”

_ No. Can we- _ his hand stops moving, fingers shaking ever so slightly. Malcolm suppresses the movement, teeth gritting behind his lips and continues writing.  _ Can we talk about something else? _

“Hey, no skin off my back,” Maria acquiesces, raising her palms to him and bowing her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to prod. I feel like I’ve maybe crossed some boundaries in the last few minutes, all the talk about being naked and shit . . . we’re co-workers, my bad . . .”

Malcolm looks over at her, absorbing the genuine repentance on her face, how it twisted every line in her skin into contrite trails. It pushes her back inside of herself, restricting the spirit tentacling from her so that it won’t hurt or bother anyone. In that moment, frozen in amber like a mosquito under the lamplight, Malcolm makes up his mind that he will  _ never  _ be the reason her face changes like that again. 

Those open palms soon find a pad of paper pressed into them.

_ There is nothing to be sorry for. You would not have had any idea. Honestly, I do not talk with people much like this, at least, not women. The experience is new for me. _

Malcolm smiles and tries to work in the honest understanding and reassurance he feels in his chest. There’s a more crimson shade of something there, that whispers he’s not just doing this because it’s the right thing to do, but because he hates seeing her face warped by the notion that she was letting too much of her soul out into the world, and because her vanished willfulness was spellbinding. He very much wants it back.

Maria lifts her head and looks at him, brushing amber-shined auburn hair out of her face. Slowly her cheeks tremble and a small, deeply simple smile forces its way onto her lips, almost like she was trying to fight it. “Alright,” Maria drawls. “If you say so. Guess you’re stuck with my crassness for a while then.”

_ Guess so.  _

Silence for a long minute or two.

_ You like Bobby Darin? _

“When he didn’t steal from Jack Lawrence who stole from Charles Trenet,” she chortled.

Time flew that night for Malcolm, taking him into the night sky and beyond the sea.

 


	3. Chapter 3

CHP3 -  _ The Ocean recalls his Countrymen and his Worshippers. _

 

His Shape is fickle.

It refuses to heed his will, no matter how intensely he gritted his fangs nor how much his spines flare in reflexive hate.

He supposes that he should be thankful he can stretch his skin out of its original proportions as drastically as he had without agony boiling like a volcano under his skin. He had made enormous progress; below the waves, he had melted into gelatinous potential many a time, more masterly and adroit over his body. Closer and closer he drew to his goal, to breaking through the crystalline surface of the ocean and proclaiming his defiance of nature’s whims for the world to see. Most of the time, he found that he enjoyed the pristine visage he’d created for himself; being free of the form that had made him the sea’s lowest, most untouchable caste was always a relief. And he reveled in his newness.  _ He was finally beautiful _ . Skin of creamy, milk-white; head-growths like a thousand glittering sardines, forests of salt and pepper mirrors; a proportional, balanced body, fashioned in the likeness of the gardens of cracked stone men he found far from shore; he’d debated asking them whether his new Shape was convincing, but they were silent and did not react to him when he swam by.

No matter how beautiful he is, however, there is one immortal gash of his former ugliness he can never erase. A long crevice of scar trailed from his lip all the way up the side of his face, a grim testament to how far the humans he wants to emulate have come. More things than there were stars he’d seen in his centuries, and greater numbers of colored facets of the great beast of  _ humanity _ than that had been bared to him.

He’d swum around hips and jutting elbows of Mother Nature, mapping out her entire geologic body in his immortal brain. Once, his grasping journey had taken him within her, up her snaking veins where different fish than those in the sea lived. There were other strange things there, too; amalgamations of piscine and reptilian, whose tongues flicked out and brought both air and water into their mysterious lungs. They marauded and grew their young in the drenched cages of tree roots. The trunks were thin. Tapered, perfectly circular roots flowed from their soles like an insect’s many legs. These were dissimilar to the rough, peeling edges of coral or the outstretched feelers of seaweed that brushed him like specters. Many a time he’d kicked his finned legs and investigated between the gnarled bars of this particular prison cell. Always, those inside fell on him with maternal anger. Terribly, he’d unearthed from slumber a mother bull shark, rubbery strands of embryonic fluid still connecting her to her just birthed pups; a rare show of parental protection from her species had driven her to bury her teeth in his scales, striking bone. 

All his attempts to calm her intensity penetrated her maddened brain as little as a feather might. He’d known their ferocity before; though bull sharks preferred the suspended black of the ocean alone, one of them was more than enough even for him. Astonishing strength keeping her flailing jaws open, he reached into her mouth and ripped whatever the pulpy serpent of organ he’d grabbed out of her was. River water, dyed yellow with sunlight that never seemed to age here, darkened orange as her blood billowed through it, a crimson tide of smoke. The clump of flesh torn from his mother was swatted aside by one of the pups. It bit into the meat, gnashing miniature jaws with little experience, and soon its brothers (or sisters) join in. 

He turned away then, nursing his wound and tasting his soul, soured at this display of juvenile hunger. Vibratory muscles under his skin shake up whole clouds of silt at the river bottom, and he lies under it for a long while, contemplating. Sleep took him soon after, only to be pierced by a white-hot fork of lightning across his cheek.

He rocketed from the bottom on sheer instinct. The soaked soil that had covered him robbed him of his vision, and he swatted blindly through murky water.  His mind, too, was obscured a bit, his reasoning hidden in layers of red animalistic fog. His claws strike nothing. His attacker strikes again, with deadly accuracy. As if by some demon miracle, it catches him in the same spot as before. Scales tumble through curling drafts of water as they rip from his flesh, and senseless overwhelming puppets him through the river, shooting from its depths and out into the world that made his hearts ache.

Sight rushes in on him, and he rolls his jaw, stretched his eyelids, anything to minimize the horde of jungle landscapes and all their denizens that smash into his irises. The dying light illuminated his human attackers well enough, and their awed, horrified faces were clear to him.

They were long haired. Wiry locks were weaved like newborn snakes tight to their skulls. Their skin was as rich brown as the silt they’d struck him from, and stark blood flecked the cheek of one of them, the same one who held a length of wood in his hands and on it . . .

A rough, black glass-hewn curve of sharp edge, still dressed in blood, spun from a spider’s web of silver twine.

As they raise their warm-colored, soft palms, dropping to their knees with eyes wide but mouths forged shut, he raises clawed fingers to the long gash on his cheek that depressed deep into the flesh. The sun had just been torn from the sky, and the wind rose.

Cold stung at it, long,  _ long _ after it had scarred over.

  
  


Maria dreams of the ocean. In her subconscious, her snores she still heard despite her slumber were the pluming jackhammer of waves upon the shore, or maybe the drunken slurs of her mother. She can’t exactly discern one from the other anymore. The dream seems to know this. She runs inland. Sarasota is gone. All that is left is a wide, sun-bleached beach. Dimples in the sand hold stagnant water and nothing living. The sun is blazing white and static and sucking the liquid life from the ground. Behind her, the monster roars, a frothing wall of water and human hatred. Her mother and the sea are one. The new thing giving chase is angry, and  _ fast _ .

Maria’s legs are hilariously slow, and soon it catches her and engulfs her, drags her under and her every pore is fit to burst with the midnight vitriol that chokes the sun to death and drowns her. Saltwater howls mutant dolphin calls in her ears, shouting down every affirmation she’s given herself for the last twenty-five years. Words break through the abrasive rush of liquid, words that’d been grave-bound for a decade.

_ “I catch you with that Jasmine girl one more time and I’ll tan your fucking back until there’s enough blood to mop up.” _

_ “No, you can’t take my goddamn keys and go galavanting around town. People have enough hurt to deal with without you and your indelicate bullshit.” _

_ “Just stay home, Maria. He’ll stand you up. You’ll be left in the rain because you’re too upfront and too much person for any man to stand.” _

There’d been a hacking cough and the stench of whiskey filled the room not long after. Her mother had had the special talent of spreading the home-breaking liquid like mustard gas and making sure it lingered everywhere it went. More than once, Maria had awoken on weekends with the smell so heady in the air that she’d thought she’d gotten a second-hand buzz in her sleep.

Just like that, the dream transforms, as if it’s listening to her very thoughts and transfigures into the worst, most virulent scourge it could. Maria would be shocked if that same ability couldn’t be attributed to her mother. The eyeless water clawing at her changes. Amber tincture replaces black ocean water as quickly as God could snap his fingers, and it’s within her, filtering through her whole body. Everything, even her fear, hazes over as the whiskey takes effect, and a final scream dies in her mind as Maria’s subconscious fades, suffocated by the maw of the same Machiavellian demon of hedonism that’d consumed her mother.

 

“Eight o’clock. We should just miss the rush at Brown’s. Don’t you stand me up, honey!”

Maria barely hears the command from Jasmine’s mouth before her friend shuts the office door and heads home for the day. The half-registered comment almost immediately gets put with the contents of Maria’s mind she remembers out of a million-percent necessity. Jasmine and she hadn’t quite been as inseparable as they had a week and a half ago, and Maria supposes that dinner at Brown’s is meant to bust out the Gorilla Glue and seal them back together.

She’s got nothing to offer her friend today. Every minute seemed to slog by syrupy, tooth-rottingly slow. And every second, Maria teeters on a tightrope between rest and sleep. She’s got just enough of her consciousness on slumber’s side for echoes of her dream to ring from the ocean like baleful whale calls and disrupt her whole day.

Never in her life had Maria ever thought she could christen herself as a superstitious person. She’d been hardy and realistic and, for the most part, level-headed, since her earliest memories. But the specter of last night had torn her in places she’d gummed up years ago, places that didn’t know how to fight the festering rot they went through when exposed to the air. Her mother’s words, first uttered when Maria’d just blossomed out of toddlerhood, warning her to stay away from Jasmine, play again in her head. 

And today, the day after she’d had a dream unknown to her for decades, the universe seemed to have changed its mind about the two of them. Coincidence? A fragile and neurotic part of her mind she’d buried screams  _ no! _

But Maria’s long ago water-boarded this particular demon. She still had a solid few hours of work ahead of her, and then the even more arduous task of filling in the cracks that’d developed between her and Jasmine.

_ No time for dreamin’ _ , Charles Bradley counseled to her through her headphones.  _ Gotta get on up, and do my thing! _

Maria hadn’t seen much of Malcolm that day; what few glimpses she’d gotten of her tentative but easy-coming new friend were standard. He’d make his rounds about the aquarium with mop and cleaning car at the ready, and she could just see the mop handle from the office window, smell the Ajax and feel the Pine-Sol holocaust every bacteria in her nose personally. It’d been a silent drive that morning, when he’d ferried her from her apartment to work, and not at all because Malcolm was mute. Maria had been too nail-bitingly shaken by her nighttime premonition to make small talk. Malcolm seemed to be as uninterested in conversation as she; perhaps he’d just had a long night, hadn’t slept right. Maria had, until that point, never been in the man’s company earlier than one o’clock in the afternoon.

But she’d felt a breath of something else in that chilly car, passing under Monterey pines flecked with saltwater on the road’s seaward side. Another mole had developed on the aura that, whether he knew it or not, Malcolm ebbed into the world. Like any mole, it could always become more malignant, more malevolent, breed more tumors and turmoil. Would this one? If her mother could rise from the waves in Maria’s dreams, she supposes anything is possible.

She smacks her own pale cheek.  _ ‘None of that, Maria,’ _ she reminds herself. It was more likely than not Malcolm had an off night and tossed and turned more than he’d liked. He had an inner strength about him that had helped  _ her _ feel better before.  _ He _ ’d be just fine.

The day wears on, the ocean swallows the sun yet again, and it shrouds the earth in darkness as black as its waters. Maria feels as though it’s  _ far _ past eight, and Jasmine was already probably fuming at home in bed.  A moment of clarity breaks through the swamp of her fatigue and she realizes she never mentioned that keyless and therefore carless, she could only leave when  _ Malcolm _ left. He was responsible for after-closing cleanup and locking the place down, hours after he became the last person in the building on a particular day.

It really would be prudent of her to clear out.

She’d last seen her keys when she’d gotten to the office yesterday morning, following Jasmine inside and depositing them in-

Third drawer down-

Under the  _ Snared!  _ paperwork-

The jangling of metal keys provides a lovely, elated backing track to her singing heart. Tiredness blunting Maria’s rhapsody only a little, she unceremoniously shoves the flow charts and assorted diagrams for  _ Snared!  _ back in their drawer, laughing in the face of their timeless, magnetic call to be drafted. Tonight was hers, to sleep and dream through all the way to the sunrise. Fear of the sea-wraith of her mother rising again is nowhere to be found. It’s been at least six hours of overtime, after all.

The door is open and the office lights off in a matter of moments; Maria skips down the plexiglass steps like  _ Sing, Sing, Sing _ has lit a fire in her belly and it’s racing, dragonlike, out of her fingertips and feet. Her eyes are so, so heavy, and they burn like she’s been staring at a TV screen all night; she probably shouldn’t drive this tired . . .

She’d almost have missed it. Maria was in a mightily heady stupor, after all. Bleariness alone obscured a lot of her vision, melting it into crayon-wax meaninglessness. She rubs a wrist against her eyelid, and takes a look around; there’s a silver sliver of hope in her that Malcolm’s around, so she can thank him. Graciousness deserves recognition. Maybe he’s cleaning the big tank that her office window faces? She doesn’t see him anywhere, and the large, flooding lights pointing at the floor space in front of the glass are still on. 

Fate, nestled in its coral castle where the darkness is indistinguishable from the void of our lonely universe, had different plans on that wind-blasted California night.

She drops her keys.

And her purse.

And her jaw, and every ounce of fatigue she’d carried that day, every truth she’d thought was embedded into the world’s immortal seabed.

_ There’s a man in the tank. _

 

After he’d pleasured himself, eliminating Maria’s licentious doppelganger from his mind with equally lusty and far less clothed women on the Internet, Malcolm is stalked in his sleep. 

Something waits for him there, something impossibly old, primal, and savagely lonely. It had seen him from the surf, locked eyes with him one day or night as he’d driven on the highway parallel to the beach. For the first time in a long time, it knew him; it imprinted on him and its hounding breath on his neck would drive him to madness. Like a Siren or a Deep One from Y’ha-nthlei, it would lure him into its scaly, webbed embrace so seductively he’d leap from the storm-assaulted cliffs and vanish forever into its mindless whims. 

It was like some unearthly cryptid straight from  _ Land Of The Lost. _ Its teeth were flanged like the head of a mace and as wickedly sharp as the spines on its forehead. Its whole body was wrapped in a brown, armorlike carapace of scales and chitin and spines, dashed with green stripes as if it had butchered some radioactive creature under the sea and anointed itself its caustic blood. Suckers akin to those of octopi dotted up forearms knotted with muscle, and a curve of scarred fortress that looked like a turtle shell could be seen over its shoulders.

It doesn’t haunt Malcolm in any particular scenario; he gets scattered, tumbling visions of it, blown to a million pieces by Sarasota’s riptides. The creature isn’t malevolent. Its teeth don’t bare in black-hearted triumph, and it doesn’t twiddle its claws in delight at the thought of finally catching its quarry. But it  _ needs _ him. Desire jets off of it like flu or hurricane rain; its eyes burn yellow with pure  _ want _ , and that terrifies Malcolm more than anything.

He’d seen it before, both in dreams and in real effigy. It was a powerful echo from his past that had found its way into his skull and had been bouncing off its inside surfaces for what felt like centuries; whispering to him from ages when Jurassic and Devonian were new. Malcolm could be anywhere, and there the monster was, drumming up from the well of his subconscious as an eager tide of need. But its favorite time to walk out of the waves and yearn for him was in his sleep, when he couldn’t escape the water. Since his youth he’d run from the terrible thing; the slimy, rainbow, undulating thing that it would take nothing short of cosmic destruction to kill.

But he was in Sarasota now. Sarasota was a small town, a pitiful presence of humanity and civilization that was a poor backdrop for the yawning, everlasting demiurge of the ocean. Its domain, where it waited for him. He could feel it aching for him, aflame with selfish urge. _You belong here,_ it pleaded. _You’ve always belonged here. Listen to your voice. The world is not ready._ _You are meant for water and typhoons. You are me. Come to me._

The creature hid its greatest horror. Its most frightening power wasn’t its teeth, designed by evolution with carnage in mind; nor was it the creature’s eldritch visage, the stirring of ancient unknowings who had only ceded their world to man out of a lack of awareness, and were preparing to take it back. The ability it had that stabbed Malcolm through his heart with fear was its potential. If it wanted, it could appear as anything it chose. Sometimes it would change its shape, muddling what little of it didn’t sicken him into twisted sculptures of bone and muscles and bitter flesh. It would become all kinds of different people of all different colors and races. It tossed on faces like disguises, checking each inch of skin and each standardized whirl of bone to make sure its getup was convincing. Under these flesh falsehoods, it could approach him and he’d be none the wiser, not until its true evil was unleashed and it sank its shark-like teeth into his neck, dragging him, gurgling, into its home in the midnight abyss. Or back to where he’d started, back to his hometown; back to the black memory where its cold, shimmering hands touched him and pulled at him for the first time.

It had carved out a claw-hewn hole in Malcolm’s past, and until tonight it had remained there. Now it lifted itself from the kelp fronds and gnawed mako cartilage buried in his imagination and hoisted itself into his mind. It crumpled his brain in vexing. He thought he was free! Coming to Sarasota was supposed to  _ fix  _ this and erect an impregnable bedrock barrier between him and this immovable, barnacle-encrusted object crawling towards him. Malcolm feels it now, like a gaping gravitic hole just a mile or two away under the water, pitter-pattering among broken crab shells and dead fish it taxed into oblivion with its constant demand for companionship. It keeps calling most of the night, praying that Malcolm would answer and become its newest friend.

Instead, he’d only brought himself closer to its world, the whirlpool of its lust.

So why not go all the way?

_ You belong here. You’ve always belonged here. _

Was it even lying? Did it have enough human in it to  _ know  _ how to lie?

Nothing so lonely could ever be as mindlessly feral as that, Malcolm supposed.

Perhaps he should just  _ let go _ , cast away his fortitude and his will. That ancient promise that he and the creature had made to themselves seemed to be little more than extra, foul-smelling baggage. His voice had been throttled for so long . . .

_ The world is not ready _ .

And they never would be. Malcolm’s voice would be as corrosive an acid as a blown out speaker, or the  _ snap _ of violin strings so powerful they’d feel them in their sternums rather than hear them. They’d know it was a chain; one collar around his neck, the other around the fish creature’s. Forget being glossed over because he didn’t speak. All eyes would be on him then, the whole world glaring daggers into his overwhelmed body, cutting him open to see just how his leash to the monster really worked. 

And then, like a carcass whose fins have been stripped into a package of shark fin soup, they’d toss his secret-filled husk into the sea.

And he knows who’s waiting for him down there.

 


	4. Chapter 4

CHP 4 -  _ The Ocean leaves Himself. _

 

IT IS TIME.

He is encased in quartz flesh, crowned by abalone, wrapped in the new form which would catapult him to heaven. Nothing less than a typhoon of anticipation vortexes in his hearts. 

It had built up over a great time, spurned by every shift of brown to white, every spurt of head spike into fine, soft hair. And now he’s ready. The water around him boils, like the spires of underwater volcanoes just before they erupt with scalding liquid and poison gases. None of that can touch him now, though. Euphoria would preserve him, through fire and venom and the vitriol of all the creatures who’d tormented him.  _ He was getting out _ .

The ocean has saturated with ebony sightlessness; the sun had long since gone down and the clouds barred the moon from shining upon the earth. The dark, impenetrable water presses tight on his body, but that’s a good thing; it makes sure none of his happiness can find a way out of him and fall like rain on the undeserving. He’s selfish with it. This is  _ his _ victory and his emancipation. Arms wrapping around himself and an uncompromising smile slitting his face, he starts kicking through his final ascent.

Despite all his insistence and indignation, a part of him already misses the sea. He hadn’t even left its pressure and formless embrace and already his heart aches just a little, in peaceful melancholy. Yes, all its skittering, pulpy children had rejected him. So what? It was still his place of origin; where the youthful bridesmaids of Gaea herself had chosen to create him, even if he wasn’t attached to the Shape they had shelled him in. His thoughts wander a little as he paddles through the waves. He reasons the tiny sphere of sadness comes from departing not only his first home but the only place he had  _ ever _ been able to call home. Every time he’d moaned in the back of his throat as he sank his teeth into the shell of a crab, marveling at the flavor, it’d been here. Every time he’d thundered from the midday surf, letting the sunlight rainbow against his scales for passing sailors to see, it had been into the ocean that he’d fallen again. Every curiosity and conflict and berserker rage and heartache and good deed had been done in this same black liquid brotherhood. From his perch down here he’d watched  _ mankind  _ grow, through every one of their good deeds and curiosities and conflicts; more conflicts than time could hold. 

Now he was leaving it all, leaving to go join those creatures he’d lived alongside for so many centuries. He’d melt into the ever-changing sea of faces that they were, in collective, and be lost in the morass of tragic altruism that humans were.

Once he was in that ocean, would he forget the  _ real _ one? Forget  _ himself _ ?

He looks down at himself. This Shape felt like a deep breath through his nose. It didn’t light his muscles on fire to hold it. With no pain to prompt him, his Shape didn’t uncoil back to his loathsome self.  _ Former _ self, he remembers. It was done. This was him now. It was . . . surreal, and empowering. It reinforced his identity more than anything he’d ever experienced. This was  _ him now _ . This was what he was supposed to look like. He’s already part of the great one-being of men, and he was fine. He wouldn’t forget the ocean; already he missed it. He wouldn’t forget himself either;  _ self _   had become an uncertain, transient concept. He was this new being his powers had forged, the one he saw every time he looked down or held his pink, squishy hand in front of his face. His body’s been made into a visual reminder of his struggles and the lengths he’d gone to overcome them, stamped into actuality for. . .  _ ever _ , he assumed.

The surface is only a few feet above his head. In three short bursts, the time for contemplation will be over, and he’ll surge into the afterlife.

Nothing greets him as he takes a last three-hundred-sixty-degree whirl around. He owes it to the sea to try to capture one last visage of it, a memento perhaps, to remember it by.

He is born again a few seconds later.

  
  


“Ah, ah, ah, pay up first, my friend.”

_ Do you have any idea how much money I blow on potatoes for you? _

“Do  _ you _ have any idea how much time I waste mulling over your problems with you? I’m a busy man.”

_ All you do is sit around under the freeway all day! _

“Yeah, and it takes a lot of energy. You ever want to be Schwarzenegger-size, you might give it a try, Malcolm.”

Marty opens one brown-colored palm. “Where’s your respect for tradition?”

Malcolm takes a seat on the dirt-sheened concrete, squinting every few seconds as a car or truck rumbles less than ten feet above his and Marty’s heads; the roar of ten-ton aluminum contraptions was so loud it hurt his eyes rather than his ears. Beyond unfairly, Marty is completely unfazed, still smiling and waiting for his starchy penance. He  _ did _ live under here, Malcolm remembers. If he thinks it’s bad during the day, he can’t even imagine what the older man must go through trying to get to sleep every night, or trying to stay  _ warm _ . Maybe it was fair after all.

From a plastic Safeway bag, which it was kept in to shield it from the elements and any opportunistic bugs carried around on Sarasota’s wind, comes a bowl of potato chips, fried in vegetable oil until they were but shards of golden-brown bliss. Marty takes a handful and starts in on munching, raising his hands to the heavens ( or more accurately the freeway underside) in mock reverence. Malcolm strips a banana of its skin beside him, peeling away both ends of the naked fruit and then biting into a third of it at once. 

“I keep telling you, Mal,” Marty says. “You make ‘em; you can take a few if you want. Chef’s benefit, you could say.”

_ Life could be better for both of us. You love them. Would be rude to intrude on your time with them _ . He flashes a smile at the older man and turns back to the fruit in his hand. 

“Well?” Marty asks. “Just me and the ocean. Well, Sal might be around here somewhere, but you know her deal. Anyway, what’s on your mind?”

Any wisp of carefree smoke Malcolm might have inhaled upon meeting his friend again vanished. His mouth sags downward in a slight frown, his shadowy eyes closing and his head cocking towards Marty, and the sea, gray as the sky and source of all his woes, as well as the upside-down trapezoid of the freeway underside. 

_ Do you think we can ever become anything beyond our pasts?  _

There’s a bit of silence as Marty’s eyes lit upon the question and his right pointer finger curls in the frayed jags of his beard. Malcolm gestures for it back, a hushed and desperate look in his eyes. 

_ We have all these circumstances when we are young, that decide who we are. Form our personalities. Do you think we can ever grow past that? _

__ “You’ll recall I grew up in Alabama.”

Malcolm nods.

“During the 60’s.”

Malcolm nods again.

“The anti-black capital of the damn country. Where cops sprayed the shit out of peaceful marchers with tear gas, loosed dogs on them. And that one of said cops was my dad.”

The same contentedness that had just vacated Malcolm now left Marty. His eyes hardened in his grimy face, and his voice lost all its raspiness, becoming implacable and clean as a knife blade. Malcolm could always tell when something had truly cut deep into Marty’s soft parts; his voice would change and every sentence would be  _ shit  _ this and  _ hell  _ that. His time as a soldier had apparently gifted Marty with a range of swears and slurs that quite possibly matched even the most bulging collegiate dictionary. Despite this, he’d never liked to swear. His sister, lost to time and the endless rolling fields of America, had always hated whenever he’d cursed.

“I remember going over to friends’ houses on some days, watching news reports on the marchers from Selma getting their clocks cleaned by whatever racist motherfuckers decided it needed doing, and cheering. I remember my sister coming with for an afternoon once . . .” Marty stops, scoffing quietly and scratching above his unkempt eyebrows. “I swear to Christ, Malcolm, I’ve never forgotten it, not for the last five and a half decades. She’s watching this guy get beat down with a truncheon, and she turns to me, asks ‘why don’t they just stop marching?’

“Why don’t they just stop . . .” The man’s eyes unfocus, and they look as grey as the ocean water as he gazes out on its rough hills. He inhales sharply through his nose, and it’s wetter, more gurgly than it should be. Quicker than light his hand magnetizes to his face, wiping the liquid from his beard and hiding it against the fabric of his worn pants. 

_ Cold? _

Marty chuckles, but something doesn’t seem right. His right index finger is twitching, so slightly it’s almost invisible, but it’s there. The patch of skin above his eye is battered, rubbed and clawed raw.  “Yeah, Mal. Caught it a week ago and it won’t keep away. Suppose that’s what I get for living a half mile away from the Pacific, huh?

“Anyway, do I believe we can become more than our pasts? You bet. You see me talking about ‘killin’ niggers’ since you met me? No. But it took years to unlearn the things my childhood taught me.  That stuff has deep roots. It’s gotta be a conscious effort to be better; above all, there’s gotta be an effort, day in, day out. Something to aspire to doesn’t hurt.”

Malcolm grins wide, and turns his eyes towards the ground. The older man takes one look at him sighs blowing a wide puff of air from his dry lips. Was it really that obvious? Malcolm guesses he’d felt so invisible for so long he hadn’t had to worry about hiding his emotions. It’s evident all over him, the bursting leaves of an open anemone.

“Well, where’d you meet her?” Marty asks.

  
  


Thunder booms. Spears of lightning chase each other through the concrete-colored sky. The whole world is hidden, melted down into rivulets of color as the ungodly oceans of rain hit glasses and eyes and windshields. Panic is still nicking Maria; its talons go  _ snikt, snikt, snikt _ across her stomach and her kidneys in time with her heartbeat. The door is still as locked as it was when she had flown home from work last night, convinced the soldiers of a watery hell were after her. Rain pummels the roof and the wind sends it breaking against the window. She almost picks up the hint of the television playing reruns of  _ The Big Bang Theory _ or similar drivel. When had she even turned the cable box on? All she remembers is the flood of cars and red and green traffic lights surging past her like stars in hyperspace, scraping the top of her foot against the concrete stairs that led to her door, the pure terror; more fear than she knew how to deal with, and Maria was a woman who was scared of almost nothing. 

And that  _ thing _ floating in there, looking at her intently. No, not a thing. The other animals in the tank, the sharks and barracudas and fish, they were things. Whatever that had been, it stood upright. She’d seen from the look in its eyes that it knew its place among the stars and the tides. It was unmistakably more than dreamless automata. 

The previous night had been a blur, distorted by alarm and tiredness. Had she even seen anything? Or had it been her fumbling brain summoning demons where there was but empty air? She tries to picture it again, standing on the rust-colored open carpet in front of her, snarling, dripping, rotten kelp dangling from its body. It’s a perfect replica of the creature, but it doesn’t fill her stomach with ice like the  _ memory _ of the monster does. The true film of cognitive power behind its reptilian eyes was poorly recreated in her mind.

Maria presses her hands to her eyes. What was she  _ doing _ ? Locking herself in her house until the end of the world over something she’s not even sure she saw-

No. She knows, deep in her chest, for certain, that she’d seen it. She couldn’t exactly never go to work again, could she? The rain keeps on drumming, and Maria feels as though the nanoliters of sweat on her skin are sucking back into her and freezing into a ball of ice right between her lungs. This is it. Any second now she’ll throw herself out of the apartment and take off through the deluge, down the street and to a world it couldn’t follow her. Or maybe the rain would wash her right into its grip.

Company. Company’s what she needs. Some other personality to bounce off of and distract herself with will do the trick. Maria rises, itching her collarbone and suddenly feeling as though she needs a shower, but just the thought of being soaked thoroughly like that is enough to put her off the idea.  

She reaches for her phone on the couch-side table, flipping through it with focus born of panic after she rises and turns off the television. Apps, and then contacts fly along the screen. Jasmine? For a brief moment, Maria considers it. The other woman had sent her a long and rude text that morning, with fierce promises that she’d be back at Brown’s that night and fill the seat of Maria’s assured absence with “whatever stallion I can pick out at the bar!” Guilt had settled in Maria as she’d read. She couldn’t blame her friend, as much as it hurt to be sidelined for a potential partner; even then, could one not say Maria was doing the same thing? Here they were with a chasm between them, eroding larger and larger every day, and on the day they were meant to fill it in together, Maria popped out of existence, chased into the ether by a glittering devil that not even the darkest minds of 30s Hollywood could whip up.

No, she supposes that Jasmine wouldn’t be feeling too charitable.

There were others in her phone, some dear friends of hers and some she didn’t even recognize; their faces lost to steady beating tides of time. Elaine? No, no. Elaine was in the middle of a dragging pregnancy, and in her new baby-carrying schedule Maria guesses she’s already getting ready for bed. Klein was getting married, yadda-yadda-yadda. The stories have similar vowels and plots the longer she looks. And it wasn’t as if they lived  _ in town _ ; they were all many miles away, only able to console her from the grainy speaker of her phone. Only one person was left that she doubted had his hands full and would no doubt be giddy with delight at the prospect of finally getting into her good graces enough to be allowed inside her apartment.

_No_ _way_. 

She still felt as though she barely knew him, still had that broiling self-consciousness in her that one has when alone with a stranger when she was with him. Letting him into her  _ home  _ was a whole other caliber of social hoop-jumping than talking at work or washing her clothes. This was her inner matrix. This was one place that troubles didn’t seem to intrude on. Did she want to welcome one in?

_ Snikt, snikt, snikt _ .

Judging by her hysteria that afternoon she already had. Self-consciousness had been cooking her insides for years now; she’d just rarely let the smoke and ash out and allowed the world around her insight into her emotions. She bumps her wrist against her head, annoyed at herself, auburn curls bunched up at her hairline. How fucked was it of her to call him a trouble? He’d been nothing but kind to her, he was entertaining, and there were still things she wished to know about him. Despite this, she knows he’s no stranger to her; He liked music. Didn’t like weed. Liked oldies music. Had clearer handwriting than anyone she’d ever met. Got a kick out of being around her. True, he was greedy with details of his life and his past. Malcolm trusted her, it was clear as day. But there were cards he kept tight to his chest that not even she was privy to. She wanted, eagerly, to know what lay in those past years for him. Why wouldn’t she want to invite that kind of altruistic energy  _ and _ his mystery, into her home?

Feeling a little giddy herself, Maria flips through her contacts and presses down on the  _ Malcolm _ tab.

  
  
  



	5. Chapter 5

CHP5 - _The Ocean finds his Downfall._

****

He waits until dark to throw off his disguise. Under cover of night, the humans whose ranks he so effortlessly penetrates are asleep and ensconced in their dwellings. He waits until night to stalk through the halls of their sea-on-the-land. It is a queer, disturbing place, and at the same time calms him with its facades of the home he still misses. Behind glass too strong and thick for him to break is the very biome he sought to escape from. Various dioramas of under-ocean landscapes line the walls. They would grow in size and scope from one to the next the deeper he ventured into the great complex, ranging from mere picturesque floral arrangements to titanic villas of marine immortality that took up entire walls.

He climbs catwalks and staircases behind doors the public is not allowed through, up to the shimmering portal above the largest of these small otherworlds. From the metal grates he stands on, he can see through the clear surface of the water the boxed-in lifeforms below. Fish and rays abound through the darkened space. A few thick-bodied sharks glide along the water, curling around each other, tornado-like. Overall, the entire assemblage is a drowsy macrocosm of organisms ripped from their homes, or born into captivity, who can only rely on each other.

His body feels so dry. Though the agony that had once come when he twisted his Shape was a far-off memory, his corporeal form seemed to be feeling the lack of contact with the ocean as much as his emotional form did. Beneath his new, human skin, his old body ached. Its carapace cracked under the unabated whims of salty air and sun; his eyes and tongue felt cotton-dry more often than not. It had taken him a long time to figure it out, but he’d found a remedy to the problem. Here, in this cathedral where the humans pray to Poseidon and Njord and Mizuchi, he could sate his body’s immutable thirst for the sea.

He stands above the great tank, looking down into its facade of a deep chasm, still in his soft and fleshy guise but stripped of all clothes he wore in his life on land. Skin ripples. Vocal cords rumble in anticipatory song. His newness peels away as brown and green flood through him like diseased veins. It rises from the depths of his body to the uppermost layer of skin and then spreads, a forest-colored ink droplet upon the canvas of his flesh. He feels his hair melt into nothing on his scalp, his eyes stretch and narrow, flat teeth evolve into devilishly-angled teeth. Suckers rise from the trembling expanse of his arms, and scales crust into being in all places.

In a matter of moments, the rebirth it had taken him an eternity to learn how to create is undone. He is his original self again, at least for a few minutes. Disgust at his regression brands his face with gnashing teeth and a curl of his long tongue, but he pushes it away. He is happy here, being human, still searching for those secrets of love and companionship that Baldr, Romeo and Gatsby knew, isn’t he?

He throws himself into the tank. Weightlessness devours him instantly, and dim, dark blue water pours over his soul. He’s revitalized. His dry hide drinks readily from the well of saltwater, his eyes protected from radiation and infection once more. To the bottom he sinks, watching as bubbles from his leap pass him by at similar speed. He doesn’t want to _think_ , just bathe in this mindless euphoria for a little longer. Feet that now sport talons and definitely were not as long a few minutes ago touch the floor of the tank, their soles pressing against transplanted sand and pseudo-coral. He can sense its falseness; the structures had none of the sacrifice that real coral had, the kind that was built on the selflessness and husks of a hundred sons of the sea. Something else radiates in him. It overpowers, completely, the hint of fabrication the entire building had given him since he’d first stepped into it, the one he’d ignored in his other life. Joy fills the tank, as tightly packed and as concentrated as the water.

He scans the tank and sees its denizens wide awake, and all staring at him intently. There were dozens of them, from the rays on the floor to the eels tangling themselves in pseudo-coral; tuna and sardines with their piercing yet timid glares, all the way up to the silver lord of the tank, the brick-headed tiger shark. It swam all around him, dwarfing him and never taking its right eye off of him. He sees the rudimentary wariness in its bendable bones. Every being in here relied on one another to keep sane on land. This was an examination; would he help or hinder the collective? Would he be welcome? The rest of the creatures in the tank watch him too, with breath so bated he almost can’t see their gills fluttering as they wait for the verdict from their hierarch.

He feels a nuzzle against his shoulder, and looks down to see the tiger shark rubbings its long, powerful body against his scales. Its eyes, dark spheres of infinity, betray nothing of what it feels. But he doesn’t need to see the creature to know. Deep in his bones he feels it accept him. It might as well have opened its mouth and said _welcome._

At this he relaxes. It would be a terrible shame if he had found as big a receptacle of ocean water as this where he could replenish his body, and then was savaged by the wicked jaws of its inhabitants. From out of his mouth he exhales, long and concentrated. In the bubbles that follow come all his doubts and his worries, blown out of him and floating away into the harsh, sterilized light of the ceiling lamps.

He spins, letting the taste of home caress his whole body. _This feels good_. Maybe he should return to the-

He stops dead in his twirl, arms tense and stiff at odd angles in front of his body. The lights in the room outside of the tank are on. White floods the cavernous floor directly in front of the glass. Upon a woman the glow falls, lining her red-brown curls in white. Her tiny eyes lit directly upon him, moony with newborn fear. He knows her. Familiar to him is her amber hair; her skin with the hue and texture of a conch shell’s interior. He’s seen her in many more lights than this one, and in this guise where she has never seen him, he can let his restricted want out in as carefree a fashion as he had his troubles. _She looks so beautiful_.  But said splendor is maligned by the suffocating dread in her eyes; or maybe it engorges her. Maybe fear is the extra spice that would make tasting her into savory heaven. He can’t tell which; seeing her here, _as_ _this crude piece of matter he had been,_ has thrown his hearts into uneasy cataclysm. He stares back at her for a long moment, large reptilian eyes meeting slitted human ones. Would her fear abate, given enough time beholding his terror? Could she love him too? Would he have to share her no longer? The secret is bending in front of him, muddled by water currents in front of his eyes but still carved  exquisitely in fright before him.

A part of him relishes how scared she is of him. Another part of him remembers how the creatures in the ocean, the real one, had rejected him the same way, and how it had wounded him.

As she flees, her every footstep marked by the jangling of the ring of metal in her hands, he’s not sure how to feel.

****

The minute the door opens, Malcolm knows this is serious. His face is grim and yet his heart is a cataclysm of emotions and self-scolding. Under his umbrella and with the orange cone of light coming from the fixture above him, he must look ominous, like a stout-hearted priest or something. When the wood swings in and Maria’s blemishless, defiant self comes into view, she looks like she’s about to cry, like she wants to throw herself into his arms. Malcolm’s mind turns as the evening sky with black anger, though his soul is singing the moment his eyes fall upon her. He is angry for her; she should never be feeling anything less than golden. Beneath the rage is a guilty slime. He’d been there that night, and he’d been unable to stop her from seeing what she’d seen. All the same, he’s ecstatic because, well, _it looks like she wants to throw herself into his arms_ , and he doesn’t quite care what anyone thinks of that except her. The possibility bombs are diffusing within him again, electrifying his mitochondria until they pump out promise en masse. Was this the day?

Maria coughs. “Um . . .” then blushes. “Thank you for coming. Honestly, I appreciate it more than ya know.”

_It’s what friends do_.

“You’ll want to come in?” She almost squeaks. Malcolm himself had almost forgotten about the salvoes of water racing from the sky. Tipping his umbrella to a diagonal angle, Malcolm manages to squeeze it through the door after his head has cleared the threshold and he needs it no longer. _Clack!_ goes the door with Maria’s swift, feverish pull. The motion gives away the shiver in her arm. Malcolm had never been bothered by rain, and so he’d not even bothered with a coat or pants on his way here. The entryroom of her apartment is warm enough, and he doesn’t feel any drafts. Had what happened truly struck her to the core as terribly as this?

The living space is much as he imagined it. Walls and ceiling are a deep brown-orange, and opposed to the orange carpet are the yellow tiles divided with brown grout. The kitchen is narrow but such is to be expected with only one person living here. Most spacious is the area of the entryroom bearing couch and television. The loveseat is chocolate-leather, with the right seat reclined backwards on hinges deeper in the contraption. Blankets and other cloths that don’t match it in color are strewn across the couch, and ten feet away is the television on a platform that looks to have had DVD storage in it before such cubbies had become obsolete. On the western wall next to both of these is a sliding glass door that would be open, curling the smell of city and sea into the room if not for the gargantuan gallons pouring upon Sarasota. Deeper into the apartment are a closet, a bathroom and what is more likely than not Maria’s bedroom.

Malcolm stands in the near-center of the room, his posture taut and angular. Inside him, though, his nerves of steel are held above flames and melted. The resultant slag free-falls through him, immolating into his skin and most certainly disrupting his calm. Why had she called him here? Could it be to . . . tell him _that_? He had thought a similar thing, that morning as he’d delved into the unglamorous and non harmful side of the internet looking for places to slake his lusts. His thoughts had snaked to Maria as he’d thrust into his own hand, telling him that he meant the world to her, that she wanted him and adored him. Some part of him knows this is little more than a mirage. Maria is not that kind of woman, and it’s part of what makes her so attractive. She rolls with the punches.

Or she had. Now she shakes and she stutters. What on Earth is he supposed to do? The roles are reversed. Ordinarily he is the paranoid lunatic of the two of them.

“Sit if you’d like,” she says, trying to renew the cavalier in her voice. “You want something to drink?”

_Any soda?_ Is written in large letters so she can see it from across the room.

“Pepsi?” Maria asks. He nods.

She rummages around in the fridge for a few moments, to the tune of thuds and clinks, various cartons and jugs and containers hitting each other. She pulls a half-polished two liter out and pours a glass slowly and with great focus. Malcolm finds his eyes wandering over to her and the glass, at the shimmers of light reflected through every bubble of the liquid and the glossiness of Maria’s hair. He really wants that drink. His body’s got holes being burnt in it; liquid metal coursing along his bones, an itch he couldn’t get rid of with anything but a flamethrower. Or a soda.

“I’m sorry I called you outta the blue like that.”

_Nothing to be sorry about. Not like I was busy._

Maria smirks at him, her eyebrows dipping in a way Malcolm finds more alluring than it has any right to be. The frame of her old self is but a flash, and the muted sense of  panic is back in a instant. Wrapping them tight around her free arm, she tosses a few of the out-of-place sheets strewn on the couch onto the floor. She gestures for him to sit down and gives him his cup. The second his fingers are secure around it he gulps down a lengthy, acidic drag of it, and even quicker comes the calm. His nerves freeze into complexes of iron beneath his skin, and desperately Malcolm wishes he could sigh.

“Still,” Maria continues, relaxing a bit and drawing her feet under her bottom. The flesh of her shins spreads and flares, and she wears no shoes. “I hate to be a bother. I just . . .”

Malcolm’s eyes fall upon her with deep import. Maria rubs her eyes wearily.

“I don’t know. I was in desperate need of some company. Jasmine wasn’t available, and I don’t really have anyone else in town.”

He grins to himself, writing at snail’s pace.

_I get it. I am Maria’s fallback for when she’s lonely._

“I can bounce you right back out that door, man. And nah, it’s nothing like that!” Maria mocks elbowing him in the ribs. “She’s angry with me. I haven’t been a good friend the past few days; been battling some emotional instability and we’ve just drifted a little. Probably more now.” She sniffs.

_Would talking about it help?_

“I mean, it’s not that big of a problem. She’s a bother occasionally but she’ll come around.”

_Are you sure? Because it seems as though that set you crashing on a spiral of anxiety so hard that you stayed home in a funk on an off day until six o’clock._

“You’re kind of a bother too, right now.” Maria glares at him, and Malcolm finds her ire as sweet a nectar as her admiration. It’s always in her eyebrows.

_Not meant to be rude. Really. It just seems like it hit you hard, is all._

She relents after a few moments, closing her eyes and sighing tiredly. “I’m sorry,” she huffs. “I haven’t felt this way in a few years. You’ll forgive me if I sully my other in-person friendship.”

Malcolm pats her shoulder, smiling at her. _Just give it to me straight. I will listen._

“Thank you.”

Maria sits up, crossing her legs and turning on the couch to face him. Her brows lift upwards, as in anguish or orgasm (Malcolm damns himself to the darkest and tightest-gripping oblivion for thinking the latter. Would it kill him to lay his salaciousness to rest for a little while?). She takes one deep breath and lets it out for five long seconds. He feels the air tickle the area of his chest just below his sternum, and the whole world is quiet except for the buzzing of the rain’s ambience.

“My mother was a terrible parent,” Maria begins, gazing behind Malcolm with little thought as to where her eyes go. “She was a thorny woman. A violent woman. I don’t know why she had me, or who with; she said she never married my father and left him as soon as she found out she was pregnant. She never had a good word to offer anyone, least of all me, and that meant nobody got close enough to us to find out she had a daughter. Every wrong move on my part and she’d find something to scar me. Belts, hangars, words; we were poor, she _loved_ telling me the only reason she hadn’t aborted me was she was worried about killing herself by getting one from someone guilty of malpractice. That always shocked me, because she seemed to have even less regard for her own life than mine. I can’t count how many times she couldn’t even leave bed because her stomach was so cirrhosis-bloated. She loved her drinks. I’d have to walk myself to school, make myself dinner, slog my way through homework I didn’t understand. That was what killed her in the end, ya see. Cirrhosis. A few days after my eighteenth.”

    Her eyes fall once again on Malcolm’s, and they look very dark. They’re twisted in odd, wounded ways, like she’s just had an insult cut her in two. Judging from Malcolm’s impression of the hag that’d birthed her, maybe she _had_ just been hurt that way, remembering some barbed jibe from her past. He’s not in her mind. What terrible memories must be soundlessly flashing through it now?

    Malcolm looks back at her with what must be utter perplexity stored behind every fold of muscle in his face. He twirls his pencil in his hand, trying to think of what to put to paper.

    _That sounds horrific._

    “Tell me about it,” she scoffs.

    _And, what? You were reflecting on things she said to you and letting them get to you again?_

    “Oh, god. No. I hadn’t thought about her for years. She’s a remora I thought I ripped out, but she just detached and was trailing behind me a bit. You know them, with the adhesive pads on their tops, towards the back of the building at work.”

    _I’ve cleaned the tank more than once, yes._

“Course you have,” she chuckles. “I had this . . . dream the night before last. Heard her voice like I was ten again. She was this tsunami, chasing me inland and catching me like it was nothing. Pulled me under and turned into some kind of alcohol. Symbolic; I thought ‘fuck, this is it. She’s come back to turn me into her’. I’m sure there’s something profound to be had there, but all I found was . . . horror.”

    _Hatred breeds hatred?_

    “What?”

    He’s forgotten to add quotation marks.

    _You said there might be something profound there. “Hatred breeds hatred?”_

“If that’s true, I must not be her daughter then.”

    _Why should that have any bearing on it? Even corpses fertilize flowers at some point_.

    She puts a palm to her chest, imitating surprise. “Ooooo,” she says, drawing out the single syllable. “Look at the big brain on you. And so charming. Can’t say the ‘flower’ bit is very original, though.”

    _You’re suddenly feeling much better._

“Probably, and I damn well deserve it.” She grins earnestly, and all Malcolm thinks of are prisms of light as maroon as her hair, as decadent and romantic and sophisticated as wine and blood.

    “I don’t think there is really much else to it,” she resumes.  “I couldn’t sleep most of that night because-” Maria pauses, and wraps her fingers around the cup that had just about reached Malcolm’s lips for another gulp. “Gimme a sip,” she says. She drinks deep from it, and the liquid is just about gone when she returns it to him. A smudge of day-old lipstick marks her end of the rim. They face each other directly now, trading this font of saccharine between them, gazes intent. Malcolm is surprised by the utter lack of life in the furnace under his belly; she is so close to him, entertained by him and opening to him. There is no aroma of romance in the air between them; nothing so grand, at least not yet. He thinks it a higher current in the waters of life, one they both are pulled by and diluted within until they taste each other everywhere.

    “Because every time I’d get to sleep I’d be back _there_. I had plans with Jasmine later yesterday and I was so exhausted I couldn’t make it. She’s the only lifeline I had when I was a child; I don’t want to lose her.”

    _I can understand that. Just apologize if you can and then keep being the best friend you can. I think you have it in you. This is all that was troubling you?_ He puts on a skin of incredulity, but deep down he knows the answer to his own question no matter what she tells him presently. He saw her that night, bounding down the steps from the office. He knows. And he will lash himself to the bottom of the ocean before he puts her in such danger again.

    “Well, not exactly. Let’s just say the downward spiral in the last day and a half was one of anxiety. And if it weren’t a betrayal of the things I’ve suffered to drink, I’d be completely fucking shitfaced.”

_No need to worry about me either. I have enough of a vice with soda. Leeches the calcium from your bones, melts your teeth or something. Who has time for alcohol?_

“Maybe you should drive down to _The Submarine_ and find out? Plenty of boomers there make time for it.”

_I can barely handle one_.

“Who?” her eyebrows raise in surprise. “Your mom or dad?”

Malcolm raises his palms in a gesture of _nuh-uh_. _A friend of mine. Homeless guy under the freeway with a couple dozen other people. Marty._ _Heart of gold. Not keen on rudeness. May I take you to dinner tommorrow night?_

“I mean, who is? He sounds like a good guy. I wouldn’t wish sleeping that close to the water on my worst enemy. At least he’s got community-”

Malcolm’s eyes are shut tight. Visual reality is cut off to him as his verbal ability to warp it has been for ages now. All that tells him she’s read the request is a vibratory pattern in the couch, as though she’s fidgeting in her seat. That, and of course her voice trailing away into nothing. Hot and cold seawater diverge; the current is trembling, fragile now, and yet it rushes more savagely. One of them is going to be ripped out of it, dragged into the sun to bake and shrivel, or hauled below the tide to where the krakens dwell in crushing darkness. Will it be her? Has he assumed too much, believed he’s tasted enough of her to warrant this?

His right eye shoots open, and in the back of his mind he hears a pane of glass shatter as his lid unclenches. It would almost be cartoony if he didn’t have so much invested in the next words that came out of Maria’s mouth. She’s looking down at the pad of paper, biting her bottom lip with the impassioned edges of her teeth. A blush that might be elation or rage had crawled from her cheeks all the way down her body to the shadowed part of her neck. The same flames of potential that Maria inspired within him are flickering in her eyes as they meet his.

_You are under no obligation to say yes. I think you could use some time out of these four walls and I really want you to spend it with me._

“Malcolm, I--” she stops, scrunching her face in grumpy realization. “If you’re so concerned with spending time with me and getting me out into the world, why are you waiting a whole day to take me out? How do you know I won’t lose my mind in here waitin’ for you to whisk me away?”

_I thought giving you time to consider would be the nicer thing to do. And we are already spending time together, right? Right now. This moment._

Maria shoved the pad of paper back into Malcolm’s hand, turning her nose up at him. The motion is playful but Malcolm can practically smell _her_ nerves, too, liquefying under the tender mercies of the embers. It’s written in the webs of still-blushing veins under her skin; the trilling, uncertain candor of her voice.

“Well,” she says. “Time taken. My answer is yes. I want to go tonight.”

Malcolm wants to slap himself until his skin turns as red as Maria’s blush. Judging by the prickling heat in his face, that most likely would’ve been redundant.

_What? Now? It’s getting dark. And the rain is still ridiculous out there._

“You walked over here in a t-shirt and a pair of shorts. Shush. Listen.”

Silence fills the apartment when she finishes the word, complete quiet not broken even by what had been punching leagues of rain from the sky.  Malcolm gets up and looks, listens. Out the window, the night stretches on across the bay and into the formless hills of the sea. No longer, however, is that dark shroud cut by anything more substantial than the polygons and chugging pinpoints of light that were Sarasota’s cityscape below. What were once falchions of water cascading from above are now almost invisible against the backdrop of the stars. The rain is almost gone, and the town is caught in the rapture of night winds blown off of the waves. It’s a cool night, Malcolm intuits; a night fit for jazz and whispers. He sits back down, content.

“See? No rain. ‘Yah ‘fraid to get wet’?” The final sentence is delivered in a bizarre elocution from somewhere in Europe, or so he thinks, that doesn’t include the pronunciations of Rs.

Malcolm blinks.

_What the hell was that accent supposed to be?_

“Scottish. It’s Bill Nighy, Malcolm! You’ve never seen _At World’s End?_ ”

_You meant where I want to fling myself whenever anybody mentions the fifth movie._

“Sidesplitting,” Maria deadpans, lifting herself from the couch and running her long, musician’s fingers though the back of her hair. “Suppose it’s a good thing you’re taking me to dinner then. I’ll have a few hours to enlighten you on the greatest film ever to bear Walt Disney’s name.”

   

Hard. Jasmine wishes the back of the barstool wasn’t quite so _hard_ on the back of her neck. But, then again, she wishes for a lot of things. Topping her list of things she could do without is unquestionably the television on the wall to her left, blaring whistles and the roar of crowds at some football game on the other side of town. The screen is at least as large as some of the aquarium tanks at work, and many times as loud. The thing Jasmine preferred most about working in an aquarium versus a zoo, where she’d worked years ago, out of town: how quiet the latter was by comparison. Directly below the television are a horde of watchers in various stages of drunkenness, who even more so than the TV are so _riotously_ earsplitting.The game is _in town_. Why in the name of all the gods of mercy are they being loud and drunk to her right, of all places? She suddenly finds herself wishing for a match. Flicking it onto the alcohol-slathered wood doesn’t sound like a horrible idea at the moment. True, the smell of immolated man would be close to nauseating, but Jasmine already felt that way as the umpteenth gulp of gin is knocked back into her stomach. No problem there. Her mind is swimming, but what of it is still all there manifests as spiked lines of spite. Spite keeps her awake when her all evening bar-hopping should’ve sapped her strength. Spite keeps her pounding shots even though the bartender’s long ago drained her wallet. Either he’d taken pity on her or had just found her as inhospitable as Antarctica to interact with and found it easier to leave her alone. She’d like the whole world to just take a hike and vanish into the glistening night. It’s an old bar. No cameras, no one to catch her pouring herself more gin; yes, the Earth could stand to phase out of actuality for a few more hours.  Which bar was she even at? Definitely not Brown’s. That’d been where she’d started, and Jasmine wasn’t sure how many miles she’d traveled around town since then.

There’d been no one strapping enough or charming enough to catch her eye, and Jasmine found she liked it that way. Very infrequently did she have cause to hit a bottle without Maria or a date sitting opposite her.

Drinking alone is cathartic, venomously restorative. It lets her fall deeper into the cauldron of her pain and whirlpool its elixir more vehemently than she could while sober. If Jasmine had to feel distraught, why not tear the scabs away and marvel at the mind-numbing anguish she could find below them? Why not drown in it?

She clenches her jaw and her fingers around her glass. She sounds like some poet. Couldn’t she just _think_ her pain as the sting of neglect from a friend and leave it at that? She’s reflected on it all night. Every new revelation she’d found caused more rage to pound through her. Jasmine’s angry at the whole world, and everything it it; angry at the drink in her glass, angry at the walls, angry with herself for being angry, angry with Maria for skipping out on her. Maybe if she’s acidic enough to the oblivious men and women around her, someone will dare to say _I know that look. You can cut the bullshit_. The bartender sure seems like a guy who had some stories, Jasmine guesses. Perhaps the turmoil that’s currently sucking her down its black throat is a beast he’s killed a hundreds times before. The notion makes her feel less alone for a few seconds.

A flash from below the light that hung in the doorway to the bar catches her eye. It’s a unique one, the sheen of fluorescent white upon waves of auburn hair swept up into a rare ponytail. The light dances on hair she’s wanted to run her hands through and pull like chain in the contagious mouth of passion, hair that had always been beautiful compared to Jasmine’s. Jasmine’s heart stops beating for at least a second, her gin-smeared lips open in a noiseless gasp.

_She is here_

_She’s come for her_

Jasmine rises from the barstool, jubilation rippling in her chest cavity. The chair is silent, isn’t scraped across the floor shrilly as it had when more drunk patrons had torn themselves from their chairs. On the other side of the bar, Maria slips into a booth, settles down and waits. She’s making up for their lost time. _This is the moment_. Everything cascades from Jasmine’s shoulders like a shelf of fine-ground sand. Her plans from their failed night at Brown’s resurface. Years upon years of the two of them orbiting around the sun of their friendship would end tonight. She’d march over there as best she could given her intoxication, scoot into the seat opposite her, and with divine crimson clarity, change both their lives eternally.

Before being stood up at Brown’s, she’d practiced her confession so that it fell from her mouth succinctly and had been unable to be misunderstood. Standing in the walkway of the bar, as workers pass by with plates laden by fried food and drink, she whispers the same supplications she had that night. Memory walks her through.

    _Maria, I love you. I have for years and I figured it out a few days ago._

“Maria, I love you. I have for years and I figured it out a few days ago.”

    _Maria, I love you. I have for years and I figured it out a few days ago._

“Maria, I love you. I have for years and only figured it out a few days ago.”

    Jasmine gets one step in, one instant of endless golden promise and one sip from a most blessed fain. Then she stops, the moment passes, and the waters of that stoup recede. Maria’s eyes burst alive with light as the door to the bar swings open again. All noise snaps out of reality in an instant; Jasmine can’t hear the TV or the watchers anymore, though now she wishes so terribly she could. It’s like watching a bus slam into a jaywalker; horrific, annihilating all her trains of thought even as she watches enraptured.

    In walks a young man with silver hair, dark eyes and a pencil and paper under his arm. Jasmine knows him. She spoke with him a few weeks ago, urging him to go find a keyless and hopeless Maria in his car. God, she’d regretted that, and in this moment of utter defeat regret blossoms into fiery self-loathing. She hadn’t completely placed her feelings yet; Jasmine had wanted so desperately for Maria to be happy. Malcolm had seemed like the closest candidate, until the truth exploded in her undaunted heart.  He strolls over and takes the seat across from Maria. She starts to say something to him that Jasmine can’t read from her lips and definitely can’t hear. The other woman’s eyes are slitted as if under the influence of some pupil-starring, holiday drug. Jasmine watches her as she takes the pad of paper from her date and looks it over.

    Now she understands.

    The intended occupant of that seat was not her.

    The place in Maria’s life that Jasmine could feel Malcolm fast approaching would never be hers.

    All that her confession would have elicited was an uneasy chuckle and pity. Better to be the jaywalker in front of the bus.

    What had she expected to happen, goading the two of them together as she had? Perhaps it had been inevitable, but Jasmine had been the catalyst.

    Pain instills her with wisdom, and she smiles wryly. Everything is so clear now, as if she were seeing it for the very first time. No misconceptions. Now she knows why she’d been stood up. Now she knows the truth, tattooed upon her.

    She was being replaced.

    She walks without noise back to her barstool, beckoning the bartender to her segment of the counter.

    “One more for the road?” She asks, grinning at him with the corners of her mouth slightly lopsided. She must look atrocious.

    “Look, hon,” he replied. “That wallet’s as thin as my wife. I let you slide with the last couple shots, but I’m stopping you here. You don’t pay, you don’t get a drink.”

    She squinted at him, chuckling, and undid the top four buttons of her shirt.

    “Am _I_ as thin as your wife?”

    The drinks kept coming, and heartache over the woman she loved soon faded.

****

The sound of nightclub ambience a few blocks from Maria’s apartment, synonymous with the softness of piano and trombone, accompanies the drying night of Sarasota delectably. Curtis Fuller’s _Five Spot After Dark_ speaks to the shrouded, cool hearts of lovers all over town. This is not the highest note of its power, though. It echoes further, through miles upon miles of lightless inland plains. It was a promising, lusty dais upon which the band had played, positioned outside under an awning likely unrolled for protection from the rain. With winding complexes of lights behind the players, it had looked to Malcolm like they stood upon the great unfurled tongue of heaven itself as golden flames wheeled into the darkness. It had reminded him of the rope lights at home, and he almost wanted to stay and watch them finish the song. His hand in Maria’s, and his belly full of soda, steak and peas, he can’t say he’s gone wanting. All his atoms are dancing with her. She’s making the whole world glow even brighter than the band had, even in the glistening wet midnight. For all Malcolm knows, it might be actual midnight out here! Despite what might be the unorthodox and aged hour, he’s feeling as sharp as ever. Every shift of the lovely matter currently wrapped in his fingers is registered in his body as though it were an earthquake and he a richter scale. Every laugh or admiration of the stars seemed to resonate across the membranes of Malcolm’s molecules. Within him, her defiant heart and the savory calm it draped over him deposit something alleviating. Something zenithal. Anticipation rumbles within him. It was beautiful, though over the stimulus of the material world he almost can’t feel it between his ribs. He’s reminded of Jack Skellington, enthused over his life-giving discovery of the pearl of Christmas Town, in spite of his own lack of clinical life. Or . . . no, that can’t be right. Perhaps the mindless, unaware desire of Lenina Crowne for her Savage? Pah. He wishes he could spit the whole idea out of his mind to pollute him no longer. His was no infantile consciousness. He might have external forces constricting his vocal cords, but he could still tell the world what he wanted and who with. And he knew, clearer than glass, who that was.

The door abruptly cuts off all lingering noise of the blocks-away band. Maria trails from the closed portal to her tiny kitchen, storing away the leftovers of her bacon burger for later devouring. With no patrons eating around them, jazz players covering, and even lacking the rain from hours ago, the silence is more than unnerving to him. Or, more accurately it was the absence of any distracting feedback from the outside world that gave him pause, dusted his cheeks in red. With nothing but each other to reflect off of, what might fill the void? It may very well be his most spectacular fantasy, but would taking the chance be worth the risk of souring it?

The instant she turns and he takes into view that euphoric fever-dream of a smile, he knows the answer to that question is undeniably  yes. “For the third time, you want some damn music on or not?” Maria’s tone is mockingly exasperated, but all the same it startles him enough that Malcolm almost jumps from his seat. Her eyes bug out at the blink-and-you-miss-it movement and she pouts her lips. “Jeez. I guess that demon that was holding you captive is not a fan of Charles Mingus.”

Malcolm scrabbles around for his pad and his pen, scribbles something quick, and thrusts it out like a Bible at her just as she’s strode across the room to a pair of blocky speakers with “Logitech” engraved upon their faces.

_Never heard of him._

“Who? Mingus?”

He nods.

“He was a composer, and a pianist. Hon, he’s up there with Ellington and Armstrong! They’ll never talk about Ellington or Armstrong having twenty-six girls in one sitting, though.”

_Excuse me?!_

She bites her lip, wagging her finger at him. “You bet your ass. He was a big lover and a big fighter. Ferocious temper. You ever heard his song _Moanin’_?”

    Malcolm shakes his head.

“Let’s just say it gives credence to the whole ‘lover’ part.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean. Maria stands before the speakers for a moment, no doubt wirelessly connecting her phone to them and flitting through Youtube for the track in question. Malcolm thinks he hears her chuckle low in her throat, and then it begins. Malcolm felt as though he might weep. What he thinks is a saxophone, blowing out a bouncy first couple of notes, rings out of the speaker. It’s just loud enough to be able to diffuse around the room and fill the space. Good God, though, the sound; so sultry and rich, rippling through different pitches like it was nothing. Now it was joined by the rising air-raid siren of trumpets and a steady _one-two_ ing on drum-cymbals. Upon these three lovers pile two more layers of saxophones, lighter, more innocent and cherubic than the first. Below and above the rest, piano notes tap in and out of silence in a rhythm worthy of the skippiest tapdancer. It is a tangle of limbs, a tangle of sweaty and aquiline bodies, arms and legs both swarthy and alabaster, a tangle of brown and gold rising crescendos all racing each other to the sun. Knotted together in the throes of pleasure, they can’t reach top speed, couldn’t separate themselves from each other. The web of bodies ascends together, raising the breaking point and the tension.

It is, quite possibly, the _dirtiest_ piece of music Malcolm had ever heard.

“Just _filthy_ , right?” Maria purrs. Malcolm nods, and suddenly feels an elevation of the mind, out of the slog of mortality and into boundless heights. The music was a premonition. In its depths was the inevitable. The truth he had felt barreling towards him for weeks had arrived, just as _Moanin’_ had begun. He had wished for it, night after day, desired that far-off, uncooperative ruby. But in his heart of hearts, he knew that Destiny intended this from the moment Maria knocked him down at work, no matter what happened.  From the darkest fathoms of his mind, the amphibian creature hails him once again; crawling through him, rooted inside him, murmuring with its foul lips below the water. In a black flash the music and Maria fade. Malcolm hears her say something to him, proffer him an arm to pull him from the ocean, but he can’t hear her; he’s too deep already. He’s belonged to it for so long. Had _it_ construed events to bring Maria closer to it? It had locked its selfish gaze upon her, and he knew that it wanted her too, as madly as Malcolm did. Had the creature somehow magnetized him and Maria together so that it could unleash itself upon her, or purloin her and drag her into the silent profundities it called home? _Could he save either of them?_

He opens silently terrified eyes, and thinks for a moment that everything will be alright. Maria’s hand is about two inches away from his, palm up. Offered.

“The song is about eight minutes long. You aren’t getting out of this.”

His eyebrows furrow, and he cocks his head queerly.

“Dance with me.”

Blushing with what probably looks like both a panicked urge to remain hidden and a melodic pleasure at being noticed, Malcolm stands. Maria coaxes him forward using her open palm, and when she stops the gesture, he’s within four inches of her. Across the room, the thickets of instrumental figures keep thrusting, keep kissing, keep sucking and biting. All their sounds of bliss radiate out of the speakers, enduring, as _Moanin’_.

“Hands on my hips,” Maria says, with smoothness and drowsiness enough to be musing. Her eyes are spiky with awareness, sharp amber, but at the same time she appears to have none at all. Malcolm does as he’s instructed. Maria’s hips are wider than he can fit in his palms, quite a bit wider, in fact. He spreads his fingers over her jeaned flesh, and through them he can just barely make out the softness of her skin. The expanse both comforts him and excites him. His deathly nervousness, however, only inflates like a wrinkled, green balloon when Maria’s arms close around his neck. On and on the players of _Moanin’_ make love, sonorous; warbling, effervescent.

“You know,” Maria remarks, with a hushed, swanky mutter. “It just occurred to me that I was completely wrong about that.” She nods her head over at the speaker, though her eyes are lashed to his. “Not Mingus’ song at all, though a lotta people put his version on a pedestal. It was a whole _album_. Art Blakey; his pianist Bobby Timmons wrote it. The title track, I mean.”

    Malcolm can only take a hand off her burgeoning flank and give a tentative thumbs up, eyes questioning.

    “Neither here nor there, I think. Though Timmons doesn’t get his just desserts when it comes to credit. He did a lot for jazz in the 50’s.”

    Hesitantly, following the subtle tugs of Maria’s arms around his neck, he steps into a slow, circling pattern around the carpet, nothing so ferociously grand as the music that Maria almost seems a proxy to; enchanted by. Beneath his hands her whole body is swaying, as if _Moanin’_ has filled her with a fiery perfume. _By God does she know how to move her hips_ . And now, it’s in Malcolm too, enshrining him in the panoply of euphoric bodies within the song. He’s part of it now, a ring in the mesh, he and Maria, both sucking down that fragrance that _Moanin’_ had to offer, and Malcolm realizes that the truth has unshelled itself in Maria’s heart too. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

    This is no dance. This is worship of the truth. This is seduction.

    “I think I’m in love with you,” Maria whispers, her eyes running over the scar on his face.

    Yes. Here it is. Now the truth had been expunged from her. Now it hung in the air, a golden miasma, which had just been summoned from the ether and out into the corporeal, watery world.

Now it was his turn.  

Malcolm tries to break away, removing his hands from Maria’s full hips and reaching for his pad of paper. The extra pen in his back pocket--

He barely makes it two feet. A heavy tug on his bicep reels him back in, and when he’s forced to face her again, her countenance have been diluted; not robbed of that dreamy, romantic look, but stirred with another substance; pure fury. Those slender hands of Maria’s are now spiders of force, angled and tension-filled. Her eyes are wide and clear as they bore into his; subconsciously, his spine arches just a few inches. She wanted him and she was going to _fight_ for him.

“I make a confession to you like that, and the first thing you do is try and grab somethin’ to write with so you can talk your way around me, like you do whenever I try to learn something more than surface-level about you? Fuck! I don’t even know your last name!” she growls. “Yes or no. Right here. Give me something I can work with, or you leave right now. _Show me something.”_

_Now_ it was his turn.

    He surges forward, flickering, like light through the support beams of a bridge. Both of Malcolm’s hands clasp her cheeks slowly, once he’s as close to her as he needs to be. With this leverage he pulls Maria in, and then sweeps a hand behind her, forearm against the small of her back and lifting her into his arms. Eyes close.

Their lips meet.

_Moanin’_ reaches its afterglow end. The lovers are spent, panting, asleep, and the moment becomes infinitely more tender. Time is slowed. Silence rules, and is authoritarian in the room, except for the soft sounds coming from their lips as they kiss again, and again. Terrible, beautiful nonsense rides over Malcolm’s spirit as he firmly pulls Maria closer, though he can’t see her. She tastes like everything good; soda and steak and the stars and salt, like fire and immutability, for the world had never really been able to slow her down. He feels Maria’s chest and the slightly pronounced curve of her stomach press against him snugly, and her spine curves into his grip. She hums deeply into kiss after kiss. Tongues meet. Triumph is in the air and the walls, in Maria’s bones, in Malcolm’s mouth; tasting like everything good. Maria’s arms throw themselves around his shoulders and neck. Her hands snake through his hair and pull, tight tree roots of sufferable pain that hold revelations in every bough. He loves this woman. She loves him. Malcolm loves her, with everything he has. Every speck of positive energy this universe received from him now was hers forever. She is the great promise, the secret of the earth, the thing he’d been looking for, the highest and most fabulously wonderful temple he would ever pray to; she will save him.

His lungs are stinging when they part. Against his face he can feel Maria’s harsh breaths and knows that she too had needed air. Gently their foreheads touch, arms still wrapped around each other. Gradually his inhalations and hers even out. A sense of calm excitement born of his triumphant seizure of his desires rolls over him like mist, enshrouding all of Sarasota and he’s sure it will expand over the whole globe. For the first time in many months, Malcolm is, in gargantuan magnitude, proud. Proud of himself and of the whole world. What else could he feel, knowing that it had birthed an emotion as beautiful as this?

By degrees, his eyes open, and Malcolm looks upon her red-dusted face. Their heads separate, and both he and Maria take it to the couch. She tangles up in his arms and legs, gluing herself around him like an enraptured cephalopod.

“I hope this means what I think it means.”

He reaches for his back pocket and retrieves a spare, wet-tipped pen. Upon the skin of his arm he writes less clearly than he usually did on paper. _I love you, Maria_ . _But I think I need to take a day or two to think really hard about what we are going to be_.

Desperation dyes her whole face. “What? Malcolm. We’re into each other. _More_ than into each other. What the hell else is there to it?”

He changes arms.

_It is NOTHING you did. Honestly. You have been nothing but delightful and vulnerable and beautiful. More than beaut-_

Now he uses Maria’s forearm to write.

_Beautiful. There are just things outside of my control that could snuff this candle out before we even light it. “Sting” would be a euphemism for the way that would feel for both of us._

Maria opens her mouth, surely intent on battling him again. He can see it in her eyes, the bullheaded flame maraging there, able to obstinate on the couch with him until the oceans rose to devour the Earth.

Before she can speak, Malcolm raises a palm swiftly. The meaning of the gesture is clear to her; he can tell from the narrowing of her eyes and the beginnings of speech trailing off in her throat.

_Please. Just a day or two._

“Alright,” comes the quiet, calm reply.

_Thank you. Really._

He takes her hand, the one whose arm bears no pen-marks, and presses his lips to her fingers in intervals. Malcolm’s mouth moves up nail and knuckle and then to her soft palm, leaving what he hopes is a ring of warmth that will hold her over until he’s decided.

_I love you_.

“I love you, too.”

With that, the two of them unwrap themselves from each other, brush out clothes and hair. Maria giggles with fatigue, neither of them wanting to emerge from that golden miasma they’d almost drowned in. But, as Malcolm’s just realized, they both have work tommorrow, and he not long after the horizon’s splitting by dawn. Nothing could quite change that immutable fact of life in society; currency was the currency of today. He could stay here and kiss Maria, and kiss her ( _and kiss her and kiss her and kiss her_ ), but neither that nor the certainty of his love for her will pay the bills.

Fetching his umbrella, Malcolm opens the door to leave, taking one last look back at Maria. Still on the couch, she radiates splendor, drowning the whole room in its red tide, smiling at him.

“Goodnight?”

Malcolm nods, grinning back at her.

The moment the door closes and he’s down the steps back to the ground floor his spine stiffens, his arms, fingers, legs, toes, all seize up and his eyes alight on the black tides of the ocean in the distance. Exaltation washes over him as literally and mightily as the waves, and his spirit soars high over the featureless darkness of the nightly seas. He knows _it_ is still out there, or he thinks it is. For all he knows it could be right next to him, hiding in the fleshy suits that pretended not to notice him when he walked near. Malcolm feels as though it is furious, chittering obscenely with well-aimed rage somewhere in Sarasota.

It’s a tastier tonic than it should be, to have gotten one over on the creature that rocketed through the water of his nightmares. He knows it desired Maria just as much as he did. Malcolm’s heart, and the monster’s hearts, entwined as a single triad, loved Maria with everything they had. But, Malcolm thinks with dark pride, Maria had looked at them both, beheld he and the creature at different points in time. _She had chosen him_ . Her eyes lit upon Malcolm and she kissed him, told him she loved him. She had gazed at the amphibian man, at his terrible Shape, and retreated in horror. Between the two of them, Malcolm had _won_ ! And the creature had been consigned by the shared object of their passions back into the dark abyss from where it had come. The secret it had traveled above the waves to unveil now belonged to _him_.

The night air is spicy against his body, stinging and enlightening. The band from earlier and most signs of Sarasota’s nightlife are vanished. A wave of silence as pure as the ocean has rolled over town, breaking only due to lightly rumbling cars and the crash of the beach.

    He breaks into the fastest run since Atalanta’s.

Malcolm speeds past deserted intersections, crossing straight across their asphalt polygons, under stoplights glittering like fly’s eyes with arcane fire inside. He runs through this tiny dot of humanity on limbs not his own. His presence is vaulted through the rushing night by the fury and wonder he finds in the elevation of his mind and heart. Some would call it arrogance, to want to taunt something that had such power over his life, and could take all he had away from him. Malcolm knows, below all of the divine bravado, that the creature has more than that much influence over him. But now, careening through grasses and sticks, with the southern curve of Sarasota’s adjacent beaches just coming into his view? He doesn’t care. It is more than love for Maria that is driving him mad with emotion, and more than hatred for the monster from the sea or petty taunting of it that drives Malcolm now. It is realization.

    His muteness, the way he unnerved people, his connection to the fish creature, all of it, the past he had wished so desperately to be rid of; none of that mattered, now. He was free, unleashed. _Maria_ would read every word he wrote. She always paid attention to him. There was only one thing he could ever say to unnerve her. And as for his tether to his aquatic adversary, well . . . Maria had chosen him.

    He shrugs away the night and the forgotten eons he had suffered, huffing and puffing like a racehorse as he forges through the midnight mirages of seaside plains. Malcolm’s muscles are flaming with an ache more head-clearing than he’d ever experienced before.The air in all the old worlds before had never smelled as sweet as this one night did. His nostrils flare as he leaves striated Cypress trees in his wake, and soon the stamped-on swaths of grass and pebbly soil transform into sand. His dream is driving him faster, hurling him into a wondrous, brave new place. The beach before him is to be where he takes his first steps into that strata of potential and he takes to it with fire in his nose. Cold wind whips off of the sea, ripping at him, the creature trying to drive him away, extinguish the candle of his victory. Stinging his nostrils is freezing salt in the air, and he can barely see as it assaults his eyes. The beach is so dark, so long, though to his right around the corner of a cliff, he can see the lights of Sarasota’s north end and the highway inland. Along this dark and freezing vista of beach, he sprints. The star-crusted horizon far out to sea holds higher worlds, more beautiful and more daring, places he and Maria could escape to, together. All of the insignificant, temporary civilization fading into the distance isn’t good enough for her. The closer Malcolm gets to the water, the louder the constellations above him are, pure cosmic force snaking across the sky and booming almost as explosively as the waves he steadfast approaches. They’re trilling, peppered melodies written up there by God, urging him with all their might to go faster, try harder, stretch out his arms farther.

    It is pure, neutral magic to Malcolm. Planting his knees in the sand and barely feeling the glacial pain of the freezing water against his thighs, he opens his mouth and roars.

Both sea and star are drowned out entirely.


End file.
